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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLEiilDGE. 



IReablngs for Students 



SELECTIONS 

FROM THE 

PROSE WRITINGS 

OF / 

I.-'" 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 



EDITED WITH 
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 



BY 

HENRY A. BEERS 

Professor of English Literature in Yale College 










NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



3y- 



Copyright, 1893, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT «& CO. 



1^ - 3 l<ro 



THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, 
KAHAVAY, N. J. 



C^ 

^ 



^> 



PREFACE. 



The design of this volume is to make accessible, 
in a convenient form, some of the best passages in 
Coleridge's prose. The Biographia Liter aria and Table 
Talk will always be favorite books with scholars; but it 
is to be feared that the ponderous essays of The Friend 
and Aids to Reflection are not often disturbed now- 
adays by scholars, to say nothing of the general 
reader. 

It is injurious to the memory of Coleridge, one of 
the most subtle and stimulating of English thinkers, 
that posterity should know him merely as a poet, and, 
as to all the rest of his work, should be contented to 
take his greatness upon trust, and as a literary tradi- 
tion. He devoted the last thirty years of his life to 
the study and eloquent exposition of some of the high- 
est themes that can engage the human mind : the being 
of God, the nature and limits of knowledge, the prin- 
ciples of literary art, and the political constitution of 
his country. His reasonings, upon all of these sub- 
jects, have deeply influenced the best thought of 
England and America. 

It may seem that an unduly large proportion of 
these selections belongs to the department of literary 
criticism. But I believe it will be found that Cole- 



IV PREFA CE, 

ridge's literary criticisms are of more general interest 
to-day than his philosophical and political writings. 
In these latter departments his speculations have an 
historical importance, but they do not, in Matthew 
Arnold's phrase, flow in the main current of the time, 
which has set strongly in an opposite direction. 

It is hoped that this volume may be found useful 
for classes in college, and it has accordingly been 
furnished with an introduction, a short biographical 
notice, and notes on the text. The notes are by way 
of explaining references not easily looked up, rather 
than of making critical comments. Words — like draw- 
cansir^ e. g.^ — which are defined in the ordinary English 
dictionaries, are not explained in the notes; nor are 
references to well-known names such as Plato, Hooker, 
Ariosto, etc. 

References to the text of Coleridge's writings are to 
Harper's edition of his complete works edited by 
W. G. T. Shedd, in seven volumes 



INTRODUCTION. 



" I HAVE laid too many eggs," v/rote Coleridge, ** in 
the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with 
ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion. The greater 
part indeed have been trod under foot, and are for- 
gotten ; but yet no small number have crept forth 
into life, some to furnish feathers for the caps of 
others, and still more to plume the shafts in the 
quivers of my enemies, of them that unprovoked have 
lain in wait against my soul." And again : ** He was 
one of those who with long and large arm still col- 
lected precious armfuls, in whatever direction he 
pressed forward, yet still took up so much more than 
he could keep together, that those who followed him 
gleaned more from his continual droppings than he 
himself brought home ; — nay, made stately corn-ricks 
therewith, while the reaper himself was still seen only 
with his armful of newly cut sheaves." 

And still again : " My prose writings have been 
charged with a disproportionate demand on the atten- 
tion ; with an excess of refinement in the mode of 
arriving at truths ; with beating the ground for that 
which might have been run down by the eye ; with 
the length and laborious construction of my periods ; 
in short, with obscurity and the love of paradox. . . 
Would that the criterion of a scholar's utility were the 



VI INTRODUCTION. 

numbei and moral value of the truths which he has 
been the means of throwing into the general circula- 
tion ; or the number and value of the minds, whom by 
his conversation or letters, he has excited into activity, 
and supplied with the germs of their aftergrowth ! 
A distinguished rank might not indeed, even then, 
be awarded to my exertions; but I should dare look 
forward with confidence to an honorable acquittal." 

These passages serve to explain and define Cole- 
ridge's unique position in the history of English 
thought. As a poet, his high place is secure. The 
spiritual wildness of his imagination, and his une- 
qualed sense of melody and diction, have given 
immortality not only to finished works like The Ancient 
Mariner^ France^ and Frost at Midnight^ but to frag- 
ments such as Christabel, Kubla Khan^ The Dark 
LadiCy and The Three Graves. Coleridge's verse is of 
enduring distinction and was historically of such 
importance that a German scholar has maintained 
his claim to rank, even before Scott, as the founder 
and head of the English romantic school.* And though 
this claim cannot be admitted in its entirety, it is with- 
out question that the uncompleted Chrisiahely which 
circulated in MS. for many years before its publica- 
tion in 1816 ; which was read and recited in literary 
circles throughout the kingdom, and was known and 
admired by Byron and Scott ; became, as to form and 
verse, the model of Scott's metrical romances and 
Byron's eastern tales. 

But Coleridge was not perhaps primarily, he cer- 

* Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die englische Romantik, ALOIS 
Brandl. 



mTRODUCTIObr. vn 

tainly was not exclusively, a poet. " Logician, meta- 
physician, bard,'* is the order of the titles given him 
by Charles Lamb, his schoolfellow at Christ's Hospi- 
tal, in his well-known description of the " inspired 
charity boy " unfolding the mysteries of lamblichus 
or Plotinus, to the wonder of some chance passer 
through the cloisters of the old Grey Friars. 

Coleridge tells us himself, in the Biographia Lit- 
erarta, that even before his fifteenth year he had be- 
wildered himself in metaphysics and theological con- 
troversy to such an extent that history, poetry, and 
romances lost all interest for him. From this pursuit 
he was withdrawn by a suddenly wakened enthusiasm 
for the sonnets of the Rev. Wm. Lisle Bowles. '' Well 
would it have been for me perhaps had I never 
relapsed into the same mental disease ; if I had con- 
tinued to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from 
the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the 
unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. 
And if in after-time I have sought a refuge from 
bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse 
researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty 
of the understanding without awakening the feelings 
of the heart ; still there was a long and blessed inter- 
val, during which my natural faculties were allowed to 
expand, and my original tendencies to develop them- 
selves ; — my fancy, and the love of nature, and the 
sense of beauty in forms and sounds."* 

^ There was a time when, tho' my path was rough, 
This joy within me dallied with distress, 
And all misfortmies were but as the stuff 
Whence fancy made me dreams of happiness : 



Vlil MTRODUCTtOl^, 

In this threnody over his dead imagination, Cole- 
ridge was perhaps partly self-deceived. His devotion 
to abstruse researches during the last thirty years of 
his life was not merely by way of " refuge "; it was the 
final predominance in him of something which was as 
much a part of his "" natural man," his ** original tend- 
encies," as was his poetic faculty. In the greatest 
poets the *^ years that bring the philosophic mind" 
do not destroy the creative energy of the imagination. 
Rather do they enrich and strengthen it, though often 
modifying its mode of expression in the direction of 
greater restraint, even sometimes unto austerity or 
bareness. Lear is not less imaginative than Romeo 
and Juliet^ nox Paradise Lost — ** unchanged to hoarse or 
mute " — than Comus. But in minds in which the will, the 
understanding, and the emotional imagination are less 
finely balanced, it often happens that the development 
of their powers is successive rather than simultaneous. 
A man will be a poet in youth and a philosopher 

For hope grew round me like the twining vine, 
And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. 
But now afflictions bow me down to earth : 
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, 

But oh ! each visitation 
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, 

My shaping spirit of Imagination. 
For not to think of what I needs must feel, 

But to be still and patient, all I can ; 
And haply by abstruse research to steal 

From my own nature all the natural man — 

This was my sole resource, my only plan ; 
Till that which suits a part infects the whole. 
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. 

Dejection : a7i Ode. April 4, 1802. 



INTRODUCTION, IX 

in middle age. Coleridge is only one among many 
instances of thinkers who have passed through a stage 
of poetic productiveness, and then lost their singing 
voices and " stooped to truth." Nor is it wise to 
lament, with Swinburne, that in Coleridge the poet 
was spoiled in the theologian and the metaphysician. 
The time which his inquiring spirit devoted to specu- 
lative problems was not altogether wasted time. The 
poet cannot, without peril, consciously isolate the 
realm of art, or cut away the domain of beauty from 
the whole territory of human thought and knowledge. 
Be this as it may, the "long and blessed interval" 
during which the bard prevailed over the logician and 
metaphysician, was not so very long in the compari- 
son. Coleridge's blossoming time was brief and was 
practically confined to the two years, 1797-98, which 
he spent in intimate association with Wordsworth at 
Nether Stowey and Alfoxden. To those years belong 
The Ancient Mariner^ the first part of Christabel^ Love^ 
Kubla Khan^ the ode to France, and the fine blank 
verse poems, Frost at Midnighty The Nightingale^ and 
Fears in Solitude, With a few exceptions, this list 
includes everything of high value which he wrote in 
verse. In September, 1798, he sailed for Germany in 
company with Wordsworth and the latter's sister Dor- 
othy. He parted from them immediately on his arrival 
in Hamburg and spent the next nine months, mainly 
at Ratzeburg and Gottingen, in assiduous study of 
German literature and philosophy. This was the turn- 
ing point in Coleridge's literary life. When he returned 
to England in the summer of 1799, ^^ "^otX. in him 
had given place to the philosopher. Shortly after his 



X INTRODUCTION, 

arrival in London, in November, 1799, he made in six 
weeks his noble version of Wallenstein j and in the 
autumn of 1800, at Keswick in the Lake Country, 
whither he had followed Wordsworth, he added a sec- 
ond part to ChristabeL But translation — even such 
translation as Wallenstein — is not original creation ; 
and a comparison between the first and second parts 
of Christabel shows a distinct falling off in poetic 
power. The fairyland which was the scene of the 
romance, as originally conceived, has become Cumber- 
land, and there is mention of Windermere and Borrow- 
dale and other Lake Country localities. The magic 
glamour has faded into the light of common day, and 
even that splendid passage which Byron admired : 

Alas ! they had been friends in youth, etc. — 

is of deeper stress than accords with the romantic tone 
in which the story was first pitched. The fact that 
Christabel was left unfinished is not needed, as evi- 
dence, to prove that Coleridge could never have fin- 
ished it in the spirit in which it was begun. 

In turning from verse to prose, Coleridge did not 
leave the poet quite behind him. There are eloquent 
passages, and passages marked by imaginative beauty ; 
in all his writings. But the '' shaping spirit," the artis- 
tic skill which distinguishes his verse, seems to have 
deserted him. None of his books are wholes. With 
loftier endowments than his friends De Quincey and 
Lamb, he added no masterpiece to our prose literature ; 
nothing at all comparable in general and enduring 
interest with the Confessions of an English Opium 
pater or the Essays of Elia. It must be confessed, 



INTRODUCTION, XI 

indeed, that his writings, as a whole, are not interest- 
ing, and that in parts they are almost unreadable. A 
select circle of readers delights in them for the stimu- 
lating quality of their thought and their frequent 
flashes of insight. But they have no popular attrac- 
tiveness, and in turning their pages it is easy to see 
why Coleridge is an influence and not a classic. His 
abstract subjects, his subtle dialectic, his longueurs^ and 
above all his eternal discursiveness, repel and fatigue. 
He carried digression to a science alike in his conver- 
sations and his books. And although De Quincey 
asserts that this wandering was only apparent, and due 
to " the compass and huge circuit by which his illus- 
trations moved . . . before they began to revolve *'; 
yet he acknowledges that " long before this coming 
round commenced, most people had lost him, and, 
naturally enough, supposed that he had lost himself." 
The unsystematic and fragmentary nature of Cole- 
ridge*s writings is largely accounted for by defects of 
character. With a sensitive conscience, a devout and 
tender heart, and a sympathy with everything that is 
lovely and of good report; he had a weakness of will and 
a lack of high spirit, and even of ordinary self-respect, 
which made him an object of contempt to men who 
were morally and intellectually his inferiors. His 
unpracticality and shiftlessness ; his constitutional 
indolence and habits of procrastination ; his willing- 
ness to accept gifts of money from men on whom he 
had no special claim, to allow his sons to be sent to the 
university at the expense of his friends, to take a pen- 
sion from the King and to leave his family dependent 
upon his brother-in-law, Southey, are things which 



Xll INTRODUCTION. 

one finds it impossible to reconcile with an honorable 
pride. Hazlitt said that the moment any action pre- 
sented itself to Coleridge in the light of a duty, that 
moment he was unable to perform it. He was sadly 
conscious of his own failing. The character of Ham- 
let had a peculiar fascination for him because he saw 
in it a likeness to himself, the same morbid energy 
of the speculative reason, the same paralysis of the 
will. '^ Hamlet's character,'* he said, "is the preval- 
ence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over 
the practical. . . I have a smack of Hamlet my- 
self."* Wordsworth's steadfastness of purpose aroused 
in his friend 

*' Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain ; 
And genius given and knowledge won in vain ; 
And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, 
And all which patient toil had reared, and all 
Commune with thee had opened out — but flowers 
Strewed on my corse and borne upon my bier 
In the same coffin, for the self -same grave." f 

In the famous picture or caricature of Coleridge at 
Highgate, which Carlyle drew in his Life of Sterling, 
he describes him as flabby and irresolute in appear- 
ance, hanging loosely on his knees, with stooping 
shoulders and shuffling gait. " A lady once remarked 
he never could fix which side of the garden-walk 
would suit him best, but continually shifted, corkscrew 
fashion, and kept trying both " — a little physical trait 
significant of a corresponding hesitancy in character. 
His head is described as well shaped and the eyes — 

^ Table Talk, \ To William Wordsworth, 1805. 



INTRODUCTION. Xlll 

hazel, or dark gray — as fine, but the lower lip had a 
tendency to droop, and the nose, said Hazlitt, was 
insignificant. 

For a number of years Coleridge was a slave to 
the opium habit, and opium eaters, according to De 
Quincey, though good fellows in general, never finish 
anything. There was a very German turn to Cole- 
ridge's mind, and one remembers Heine's taunt about 
Faust, and Schelling's God, and the Prussian Consti- 
tution, and other things unfinished. Coleridge had, 
for instance, G^r^W//VM^//, /. ^., not thoroughness in the 
English sense, but an instinct for going back to first 
principles, for being ** basic*' and "central" in the 
discussion even of subjects like literary criticism or 
contemporary politics. "Bentham and Coleridge," 
wrote J. S. Mill, "agreed in perceiving that the 
groundwork of all other philosophy must be laid in 
the philosophy of the mind. To lay this foundation 
deeply and strongly, and to raise a superstructure in 
accordance with it, were the objects to which their 
lives were devoted." 

Coleridge was always laying foundations, but the 
superstructure seldom got raised. Among other things 
which he projected were a History of British Litera- 
ture in eight volumes, a monumental Logosophia^ or 
philosophical system, and an epic poem on the Fall of 
Jerusalem. " I schemed it at twenty-five," he said of 
the last, "but alas ! venturum expectat." At the end 
of his uncompleted ballad. The Three Graves^ the poet 
wrote, ^'Carmen reliquum in futurum tempus relegatum. 
To-morrow ! and to-morrow ! and to-morrow ! — " a 
pathetic outcry, which might not inappropriately stand 



XIV INTRODUCTION. 

as the motto of his whole life. Besides the physical 
inertness which made him prefer speculation to action, 
talking to writing, there should also be mentioned 
among the causes of his comparatively small perform- 
ance, the poverty which continually disturbed him and 
drove him to newspaper writing and other kinds of 
hack-work. *^ From circumstances," he wrote in 1821, 
" the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, 
ripe indeed, and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but 
a large part only for the sheaving and carting and 
housing ; but from all this I must turn away, must let 
them rot as they lie, and be as though they had never 
been, for I must go and gather blackberries and 
earth-nuts, or pick mushrooms and gild oak-apples for 
the palates and fancies of chance customers." 

But while, from all these causes, Coleridge's prose 
writings are, as a whole, unsatisfactory, their impor- 
tance in another way can hardly be overestimated. 
His thoughts live on in the impulses which they have 
awakened in other minds, and take on ever hew forms 
and combinations, lost and scattered in the general 
mass of opinion which they have helped to create. It 
was in his suggestiveness that his great service to pos- 
terity resided. He was what J. S. Mill calls a ** semi- 
nal mind," and his thinking had that power of stimu- 
lating thought in others which is the mark and the 
privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to 
some pregnant saying of Coleridge's, if not the birth in 
himself of a new intellectual life, at least the starting 
of fruitful trains of reflection, which have modified his 
whole view of certain subjects. On everything that he 
left is set the seal of high mental authority. In the- 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

ology, in philosophy, in political speculation and lit- 
erary criticism, he set currents flowing which are flow- 
ing yet. 

Talk was the medium through which Coleridge most 
strongly influenced his own and the younger genera- 
tion. Wonderful things are told of his eloquent mon- 
ologues by Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Talfourd, Car- 
lyle, and indeed by all who had listened to him. ** No 
talk in his century or any other could be more sur- 
prising,*' is the testimony of Carlyle, in his admiring 
but not altogether respectful report of the matter. At 
the house of Mr. Gillman, at Highgate, where Cole- 
ridge found an asylum during the last years of his life 
(1816-1834), he held a sort of philosophical salon, and 
was eagerly resorted to by *^ young, inquiring men," to 
whom he was as an oracle, "a kind of prophetic or 
magician character.*' Among these young seekers 
after truth were Edward Irving, Julius Hare, Arthur 
Hallam, F. D. Maurice, and many others, through 
wliose writings the master's teaching became operative 
upon the general body of English opinion. 

It is now time to consider briefly what the character 
and tendency of that teaching were in the various 
departments of literary criticism, politics, theology, and 
metaphysics. As a literary critic, if certain deduc- 
tions be made in favor of his violent prejudice against 
the French nation, Coleridge is unsurpassed for fine- 
ness of insight and breadth of comprehension. His 
writings in this department are of more lasting interest 
than in any other, yet they are even less consecutive 
than his political and theological works. His critical 
opinions have to be gathered from scattered sources. 



XVI INTRODUCTION, 

He was seldom capable of insulating a subject and 
treating it with firmness and fullness in a single essay. 
But his hints are weighty enough to have compelled all 
subsequent critics to think his thoughts over again. 
Modern English criticism goes back to Coleridge for 
its starting point, as German philosophy goes to Kant. 
He represented in theory, as in practice, the reaction 
against eighteenth century academicism, the Popean 
tradition in poetry, and the shallow maxims of pseudo- 
classicism, just as the Critical Philosophy represents 
the reaction against the dogmatism of Wolf. He 
revolutionized, for one thing, the traditional view of 
Shakspeare. He pointed out that what had been cur- 
rently regarded as the accidental products of a wild 
and irregular genius in our great dramatist, were like- 
wise the results of a profound art : that Shakspeare 
was " correct " in a truer sense than Racine. He did 
this for the English public at the same time that 
Schlegel was doing it for the Germans, but in a great 
measure independently of Schlegel."^ 

* Schlegel's lectures, Ueber Dramatische Kunst und Litter atur^ 
were delivered at Vienna in the spring of 1808, and published in 
1809. Coleridge's first series of lectures, on poetry and art, was 
delivered in the spring of 1808 before the Royal Institution. He 
claimed that in these lectures he had already anticipated the prin- 
ciples of Shakspearean criticism which he was afterward accused 
of borrowing from wSchlegel. No reports of this first series of 
lectures exist. In 1 8 1 i-i 2 he delivered a second course, of seventeen 
lectures, on Shakspeare and Milton, before the London Philo- 
sophical Society, seven of which were published in 1856 by Mr. J, 
Payne Collier, from shorthand notes taken at the time. In 18 18 
a third course of lectures, on a wide variety of literary topics, was 
given at a lecture room in Flower de Luce Court, near the Temple. 



INTRODUCTION. xvil 

Coleridge's method in criticism is always psycho- 
logical. In this, as in all other provinces of thought, 
he was still endeavoring to lay his groundwork in the 
philosophy of the mind. It must be acknowledged 
that this method is sometimes exasperating to the 
merely literary reader. It is going a good way back 
for a start when, in the Biographia Literaria, the 
author is led on from his history of the inception of 
the Lyrical Ballads^ to pursue a chance hint as to the 
proportions of fancy and imagination in Wordsworth's 
poetry, through ten stricken chapters, in which he 
discusses the law of association of ideas, the Hartleian, 
Cartesian, and Kantian systems ; throws in a chapter 
of digression and anecdotes, winds up with an analysis 
of the imagination or ^^ esemplastic power," and finally, 
in Chapter XIV., brings round again to the Lyrical 
Ballads, 

Coleridge, like Lamb, did much to revive an inter- 
est in the old English dramatists, poets, and humorists 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The 

The fourth, fifth, and sixth of this series were devoted to Shak- 
speare and " comprised," as the prospectus announced, '' the sub- 
stance of Mr. Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, 
enlarged and varied by subsequent study and reflection." These 
were the lectures which, partly written out and partly in the shape 
of rough, preparatory notes, were published in the first and second 
volumes of the Literary Remains (1836). They contain a number 
of passages borrowed, in substance, from Schlegel's Dramatic 
Lectures, but engrafted with original matter of so high value that 
ho harsher name than interpretation will fit such borrowing. 
Coleridge was certainly never guilty of intentional plagiarism, 
though his vague, forgetful habit of mind made him careless in his 
manner of acknowledging literary debts. 



XViu INTRODUCTION, 

terminology of criticism is in his debt for many of 
those convenient distinctions, familiar to-day, but 
which he was among the first to introduce, or to 
enforce and illustrate : the distinction between fancy 
and imagination, genius and talent, wit and humor, 
a copy and an imitation, etc. His definitions 
and apothegms are met with everywhere. ** Every 
man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist." *^ Prose 
is words in their best order ; poetry, the best words in 
the best order," and the like. Of equal authority are 
the numerous critical dicta scattered through his 
writings, e. g.^ that Hebrew poetry had sublimity, and 
Greek had not ; that Shakspeare is sometimes coarse 
but never gross. ; that Othello was not naturally jealous, 
but Leontes, in the Winter s Tale, was ; that Polonius 
was "the personified memory of wisdom no longer 
actually possessed." Next to his notes on Shakspeare, 
the most important contributions of Coleridge to lit- 
erary criticism are to be found in the chapters of the 
Biographia Literaria devoted to the discussion of 
Wordsworth's poetry and to the theory of poetic dic- 
tion announced in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads ; 
and in particular, in Chapters IV., XIV.-XXH.: and 
in various passages scattered through his volume of 
Table Talkf" 

* The Biographia Literaria (1817), was described by its author 
as a history of his literary life and opinions, and as a treatise on 
the true nature of poetic diction. Though without sequence or 
conclusion, the Biographia Literaria is, perhaps, that one among 
his prose books which lovers of Coleridge turn to oftenest and 
would miss most. It is exceedingly rich in thought, and its analy- 
sis of the principles of poetic composition is profound. 

Coleridge's Table Talk (1835), consists of selections from notes 



INTRODUCTION-. Xix 

In politics, theology, and metaphysics, as in literary 
criticism, Coleridge represents the reaction against the 
spirit of the eighteenth century. In youth, as is well 
known, he was, like his friends Wordsworth and 
Southey, a "friend of liberty," a sympathizer with the 
principles of the French Revolution, and a fierce 
denouncer of the acts of the Pitt and Grenville minis- 
try. In 1794 he joined Southey in the composition of 
a revolutionary drama on the Fall of Robespierre, In 
1795 — ^^ y^^^ ^^ ^^^^ ^^^d Southey's marriage to the 
two Misses Fricker, at Bristol — he was projecting with 
Southey and Lovell a Pantisocracy or community on 
the banks of the Susquehanna. This visionary scheme 
was abandoned, chiefly for want of funds, and by 1798, 
as appears from his ode to France, Coleridge had 
learned to despair of any good accruing to liberty from 
the course of the French revolutionists. 

" The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, 
Slaves by their own compulsion." 

of his conversations, taken during the last twelve years of his life 
(1822-34), by his nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Cole- 
ridge. It exhibits, better than any other single volume, the range 
of his reading and the fullness of his mind. As specimens of the 
familiar discourse of the most wonderful talker of his time, these 
notes are of the greatest interest ; but to compare them, as has 
been done, on the one hand with Bacon's Essays, and on the other, 
with Dr. Johnson's talk, as reported by Boswell, is misleading. 
Bacon's Essays were condensed, but deliberately arranged written 
thoughts, not paragraphs caught here and there — '' Sunny islets of 
the blest and the intelligible," as Carlyle describes them, emerging 
from floods of "lawlessly meandering discourse." As to John- 
son's talk, its charm is its colloquial character, its aptness in 
rejoinder, while Coleridge was great in monologue only. 



XX mTRODUCTIOISr. 

By 1799, the year of his return from Germany, his 
conversion was complete. In after life, indeed, he 
strenuously denied that he had ever been a Jacobin : 
he had only been a Pantisocrat. 

To the political doctrine of the Revolution — the 
doctrine, viz., that monarchy, class distinctions, a 
state church, and in fact all the institutions of society, 
as then constituted, were absurd in theory and corrupt 
in fact and ought to be utterly abolished and a new 
beginning made on the abstract principles of universal 
liberty and equality — to this destructive reform, this 
root and branch democracy, Coleridge opposed the 
view that any belief or institution which human society 
had built up, must have had a rational idea at the bot- 
tom of it ; must have served at some time a useful end. 
He proposed to inquire what this idea was : the idea, 
e. g., which underlay monarchy, or aristocracy, or the 
Church of England. Is there not something in each 
of these which is useful or, perhaps, even necessary ? 
May we not preserve this useful part, while modifying 
the institution to suit modern needs ? If the institu- 
tion has wandered away from its original idea, may we 
not, without destroying it altogether, recall it to that 
idea, and make it once more a benefit to society, rather 
than a nuisance and an anachronism ? *' By Cole- 
ridge," says J. S. Mill, ** men have been led to ask 
themselves, in regard to any ancient or received 
opinion, not * Is it true,' but * What is the meaning of 
it ? * . . . He looked at it from within and endeav- 
ored to see it with the eye of a believer in it. . . The 
very fact that any doctrine had been believed by 
thoughtful men, and received by whole nations or gen- 



INTRODUCTION. XXI 

erations of mankind was part of the problem to be 
solved." * Such then was Coleridge's conservatism ; 
and it is evident how far this reverent and enlightened 
wish to find whatever of good could be found in the 
ancient beliefs and institutions of England, differed 
from the stupid bigotry and mere junkerism of the 
rabble of Tory statesmen and churchmen whose prej- 
udices Coleridge armed with reasons. 

So far, Coleridge's political doctrines were in line 
with that whole historical method of inquiry which 
has been applied, since his time, with such valuable 
results in the various sciences of man. They were in 
line with the later writings of Burke, though Burke 
still called himself a Whig, and Coleridge became, in 
fact if not in name, a Tory. Indeed the indurating 
effects of age, and of the long holding of any par- 
ticular set of doctrines, is sadly apparent in Cole- 
ridge's case, when one finds his liberal conservatism 
gradually giving way to a somewhat intolerant ob- 
structionism ; finds him opposing the Reform Bill of 
1832, Catholic emancipation, the admission of dis- 
senters to the universities, and the repeal of the corn 
laws, nay, even apologizing for the burning of Serve- 
tus. " A right to protection," he says, " I can un- 
derstand ; but a right to toleration seems to me a 
contradiction in terms.'' f 

* Coleridge : London and Westminster Review^ March, 1840. 

f Table Talk, 498, and see p. 117 of these selections. The 
most important source for a knowledge of Coleridge's political 
opinions is the series of essays entitled The Friend, and especially 
the first section (Essays I. -XVI.), " On the Principles of Political 
Knowledge." These were originally issued in the form of a 



xxil INTRODUCTION, 

" If it be true as Lord Bacon affirms," wrote J. 
S. Mill in 1840, *^that a knowledge of the speculative 
opinions of the men between twenty and thirty years 
of age is the great source of political prophecy, the 
existence of Coleridge will show itself by no slight 
or ambiguous traces in the coming history of our 
country, for no one has contributed more to shape the 
opinions of those among its younger men, who can be 
said to have opinions at all." Among these younger 
men were Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Julius Hare, F. D. 
Maurice, and other theologians popularly identified 
with that Broad Church Party * which traces its in- 
tellectual origin to the writings and conversations 
of Coleridge. As a young man, he had been a Uni- 
tarian and had preached from Unitarian pulpits in 
Taunton and Shrewsbury. His opinions finally crys- 

weekly journal, which ran through twenty-seven numbers (August, 
1809-March, 1 8 10) and were recast and published in book form 
in 1 81 8. Coleridge was residing with Wordsworth at Allan Bank, 
when he undertook this most unpractical experiment in journalism, 
" to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, and 
religion." A newspaper filled with fundamentals and high abstrac- 
tions was doomed to failure. But to make failure more sure, the 
editor regaled his readers with ' ' literary amusements interspersed " 
— designated in the reprint of 1818 as *' First Landing Place," 
*' Second Landing Place," etc. — and consisting of essays on the 
distinction between the Reason and the Understanding, and notices 
of the life and character of Sir Alexander Ball, the Governor of 
Malta, whom Coleridge served as secretary, during his sojourn at 
the island in 1804-05. 

* Maurice always protested against the term ' ' Broad Church 
Party " and against the notion that there were — or should be — par- 
ties in the Church. 



IN TROD UCTION. XXIU 

tallized into trinitarian orthodoxy, and he became 
even somewhat violently anti-Socinian. The national 
Church establishment too, he zealously upheld, though 
he took no narrow view of its functions ; considering 
it is an endowment for the advancement of civilization 
in the community ; a fund for the support, not of a 
priestly class merely, but of the clerisy of the nation, 
/..d"., the learned of all denominations and of all arts. 
This is the ideal of a national Church laid down in his 
treatise. On the Constitution of the Church and State 
(1830). On the subjects of Apostolic Succession, and 
the divine ordination of the episcopal form of church 
government, Coleridge seems to have held very much 
the same opinions as were held by the author of 
Ecclesiastical Polity, to whose authority, as to that of 
Coleridge, Broad-church men are accustomed to refer. 
But on these points, as on all others of doctrine and 
discipline, he made complete submission of his private 
judgment, and " could still," says Carlyle, *^ say, and 
point to the Church of England, with its singular old 
rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide, Esto per- 
petual * 

The change in Coleridge's religious beliefs was 
accompanied or preceded by a corresponding change 
in his philosophy. In his youth he had been an 
admirer of Hartley and accepted his system, a modi- 
fication of the empirical philosophy of Locke, which 

* The fullest statement of Coleridge's theology is to be looked 
for in his Aids to Reflection^ put forth in 1825, and many times 
reprinted. It is in the shape of a series of aphorisms, comment- 
ing on passages from Leighton, Taylor, Field, Hooker, Burnet, 
and other old English divines. 



XXIV INTRODUCTION, 

he afterward disputed in the Biographia Literaria 
(Chaps. V. and VI.). But when he went to Germany, 
he made acquaintance with the transcendental philos- 
ophy of Kant and of his continuators, Fichte and 
Schelling, which had such power upon the general lit- 
erature of Germany, but was known in England only 
by hearsay, until Coleridge — and in a much less 
degree, Carlyle — introduced some of its ideas in their 
writings. Coleridge was the electric spark which 
marked the contact of English and German thought. 
He originated nothing in this province, but his acute 
and sympathetic genius made itself the conductor of 
more systematic thinkers. Through him they reached 
the merely literary classes, and inspired men like 
Emerson and Carlyle. He was never weary of 
expounding the Kantian distinction between the 
Reason ( Vernunft) and the Understanding ( Verstand). 
In the Biographia Liter aria^ he affirms that his main 
object in starting The Friend vj2i^ to establish this dis- 
tinction, which became to him very much what Charles 
I. was to poor Mr. Dick and his memorial, and turns 
up constantly in the most unexpected places. 

But the transcendental idealism, or identity philos- 
ophy, of Schelling had, at one time, a specially strong 
fascination for Coleridge, as it has had for many minds 
in which reason has been colored by imagination. 
Schelling was himself a poet, and his system has a 
certain symmetry which gratifies the artistic instinct, 
while it flatters the reason by its promise to reduce all 
principles to one. The outside universe — nature — has 
no existence independent of the mind ; nor has the 
mind -existence, independent of the universe. In 



IMTRODUCTlOAt. XXV 

every act of knowledge, subject and object are identi- 
cal ; /. <?., the mind knows only itself, perceives only 
its own states of consciousness, and yet instinctively 
distinguishes itself from its object. Nature and mind 
are one and yet are opposed to one another. They 
are the positive and negative ends of the same magnet. 
The subject becomes conscious of itself only through 
its recognition of the object. How can this at once 
identity and diversity be reconciled "t Only in a higher 
unity, in God or the Absolute, which is the indiffer- 
ence point of the magnet, where subject and object 
become one. Nature is the dark side of mind. In 
man, the Absolute becomes conscious of itself, makes 
of itself, as nature, an object to itself, as mind. " The 
souls of men are but the innumerable individual eyes 
with which our infinite World- Spirit beholds himself. 
The finite soul exists only by the self-limitation of the 
infinite or absolute soul, which is God." 

We are familiar enough in New England with this 
way of thinking ; and that we are so is, in a great meas- 
ure, due to Coleridge, who sifted Schelling's thought 
through the golden network of his own imagination. 
We have had the identity philosophy presented to us 
in beautiful forms, and in language that attracts by its 
poetic mysticism.* *' His experience," says Emerson, 
of the transcendentalist, ^' inclines him to behold the 
procession of facts, you call the world, as flowing per- 
petually outward from an invisible, unsounded center 
in himself ; center alike of him and of them, and 
necessitating him to regard all things as having a sub- 

* Schopenhauer defines mysticism as the soul's recognition of 
itself in nature. 



XXVI IMrRODUCTIOM. 

jective or relative existence — relative to that aforesaid 
unknown center of him. There is no bar or wall in 
the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the 
cause, begins." ** I become a transparent eyeball ; I 
am nothing ; I see all ; the currents of the Universal 
Being circulate through me ; I am part and particle of 
God.*' *' In me is the sucker that I see/' exclaims 
Thoreau ; and, of Walden Pond 
** I am its stony shore, 

And the breeze that passes o'er." 

The logical outcome of Schelling's Natur-Philo- 
Sophie is pantheism, or the identification of God with 
nature. From this conclusion Coleridge shrank ; and 
in his later utterances he affirmed an everlasting and 
essential difference between matter and spirit. In 
other words, he settled finally into theism and philo- 
sophical dualism. 

Coleridge's expositions of German transcendental- 
ism are found everywhere in his prose writings, but 
more particularly in the Biographia Literaria^ Chapters 
v., VII., VIII., IX., and XII. In these chapters he 
incorporated many passages from Schelling's System 
des Transcendentalen Idealismus and other works. 

For the facts of Coleridge's life, consult Mr. H. D. 
Traill's Coleridge, in the '' English Men of Letters 
Series": Hall Caine's Life of Coleridge; and Alois 
Brandl's Sa7nuel Taylor Coleridge and the English 
Romantic School. Original sources of value are the 
unfinished Life, in one volume, by Gillman ; Cottle's 
Early Recollections^ and De Quincey's Autobiographical 
Sketches, 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born October 21 ^ 
1772, at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, of which parish 
his father was vicar. He was sent to school at Christ's 
Hospital, London, and in his nineteenth year entered 
Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1793 he suddenly 
quitted Cambridge, went to London, and enlisted in 
the Fifteenth Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas 
Titus Comberback. His friends obtained his dis- 
charge April 10, 1794, and he returned to the uni- 
versity, but left it without obtaining a degree. On 
October 24, 1795, he was married, at Bristol, to Miss 
Sara Fricker, whose sister Edith became Mrs. Robert 
Southey, on the 14th of November following. For the 
next three years Coleridge resided in the neighborhood 
of Bristol, first at Clevedon, and afterward at Nether 
Stowey, in intimate association with Wordsworth, 
who was living at Alfoxden, a few miles away. In 
1796 Coleridge undertook a weekly journal in the 
Liberal interest, The Watchman, which ran through 
only ten numbers. His first volume of poems was 
published at Bristol, in the same year. The Lyrical 
Ballads, containing nineteen poems by Wordsworth, 
and four by Coleridge — including The Ancient Mari- 
ner — were issued at Bristol in the spring of 1798. In 



XxviU BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, 

January, 1798, Coleridge quitted Stowey for Shrews- 
bury, to fill the pulpit of a Unitarian chapel. But this 
position he soon resigned, in consequence of an annu- 
ity of ;^i5o, settled upon him by his friends Thomas 
and Josiah Wedgewood, on condition of his devoting 
himself exclusively to literature. In September, 1798, 
he went to Germany, with William and Dorothy Words- 
worth, and devoted nearly a year to study, chiefly at 
Ratzeburg and Gottingen, returning to England in the 
summer of 1799. Toward the close of that year he 
became a regular contributor of political articles to 
the Morning Post ; but in the summer of 1800 he 
quitted London, for Greta Hall, near Keswick, in the 
" Lake Country." Southey had settled at Keswick, 
and Wordsworth was living at Grasmere, twelve miles 
away. Greta Hall continued to be Coleridge's home — 
or at least the home of his wife and children — until 
1810, but he was frequently absent from it. In 1801, 
while suffering from an attack of rheumatism, he began 
ithe use of narcotics, and his indulgence in them 
' became a habit, which lasted until 1816. In April, 
1804, he went to Malta, wbere he became secretary to 
the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball. He returned to 
England in August, 1806, and during the next few 
years engaged in various literary enterprises, residing 
partly in the ** Lake Country," and partly in London, 
where he contributed to the Courier and delivered a 
course of lectures before the Royal Institution (1808). 
In 1809 he took up his residence with Wordsworth at 
Allan Bank, Grasmere, where he wrote and published 
his monthly serial. The Friend. The Friend expired 
in March, 1810, and shortly after its discontinuance. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, xxix 

Coleridge left his home in the '* Lake Country " for- 
ever. He resumed, in London, his contributions to 
the Courier^ and he gave other lecture courses at 
London and at Bristol. But his circumstances became 
more and more desperate, through continual ill health, 
pecuniary embarrassments, and his increasing addiction 
to opium. Finally, in 1816, he put himself under the 
care of Dr. Gillman of Highgate, at whose house he 
found a home and an asylum until his death, July 25, 
1834. In 1 8 13 his tragedy, Remorse^ had a suc- 
cessful run of twenty nights at Drury Lane Theater. 
In 1816 he published Christabel^ and in 181 7 the Bio- 
graphia Literaria and a collection or reissue of his 
poems, under the title Sibylline Leaves. Four volumes 
of Coleridge's Literary Remains were published in 
1836-39, edited by his nephew Henry Nelson Cole- 
ridge. 



SELECTIONS FROM COLERIDGE. 



%itcvav^ Crftfcfsm* 

I. THE CHARACTERISTIC EXCELLENCIES 
OF WORDSWORTH^S POETRY. 

To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, 
are only occasional, I may oppose, with far less fear of 
encountering the dissent of any candid and intelligent 
reader, the following (for the most part correspondent) 

5 excellencies. First, an austere purity of language both 
grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appro- 
priateness of the words to the meaning. Of how high 
value I deem this, and how particularly estimable I 
hold the example at the present day, has been already 

10 stated : and in part too the reasons on which I ground 
both the moral and intellectual importance of habitu- 
ating ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression. It 
is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance with the 
master-pieces of art will suffice to form a correct and 

15 even a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces 
have been seen and admired; while, on the other 
hand, the most correct notions and the widest 
acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages 
and countries will not perfectly secure us against the 

20 contagious familiarity with the far more numerous off- 



2 LITER ARY CRITICISM. 

spring of tastelessness or of a perverted taste. If this 
be the case, as it notoriously is, with the arts of music 
and painting, much more difficult will it be to avoid 
the infection of multiplied and daily examples, in the 
practice of an art which uses words, and words only, 5 
as its instruments. In poetry, in which every line, 
every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and 
deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, 
to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to pro- 
pose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely, 10 
its untranslatableness in words of the same language 
without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, how- 
ever, that I include in the meaning of a word not only its 
correspondent object, but likewise all the associations 
which it recalls. For the language is framed to convey 15 
not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood 
and intentions of the person who is representing it. In 
poetry it is practicable to preserve the diction uncor- 
rupted by the affectations and misappropriations which 
promiscuous authorship, and reading not promiscuous 20 
only because it is disproportionally most conversant 
with the compositions of the day, have rendered general. 
Yet even to the poet, composing in his own province, 
it is an arduous work: and as the result and pledge of 
"a watchful good sense, of fine and luminous distinc- 25 
tion, and of complete self-possession, may justly 
claim all the honor which belongs to an attainment 
equally difficult and valuable, and the more valuable 
for ^being rare. It is at all times the proper food of 
the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence 30 
it is both food and antidote. 

In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to pre- 



WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 3 

serve our style wholly unalloyed by the vicious phrase- 
ology which meets us everywhere, from the sermon to 
the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator to 
the speech from the convivial chair^ announcing a 

5 toast or sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while we 
are complaining of them. The poems of Boetius rise 
high in our estimation when we compare them with 
those of his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris 
and others. They might even be referred to a purer 

10 age, but that the prose in which they are set, as jewels 
in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the 
writer. Much however may be effected by education. 
I believe, not only from grounds of reason, but from 
having in a great measure assured myself of the fact 

15 by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth 
led from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning 
of every word and the reason of its choice and posi- 
tion, logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under 
new names. 

20 On some future occasion, more especially demand- 
ing such disquisition, I shall attempt to prove the 
close connection between veracity and habits of 
mental accuracy: the beneficial after-effects of verbal 
precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which 

25 masters the feelings more especially by indistinct 
watch-words; and to display the advantages which 
language alone, at least which language with incom- 
parably greater ease and certainty than any other 
means, presents to the instructor of impressing modes 

30 of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, 
and as it were by such elements and atoms, as to 
secure in due time the formation of a second nature. 



4 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

When we reflect, that the cultivation of the judgment 
is a positive command of the moral law, since the 
reason can give \h^ principle alone, and the conscience 
bears witness only to the motive^ while the application 
and effects must depend on the judgment: when we 5 
consider, that the greater part of our success and 
comfort in life depends on distinguishing the similar 
from the same, that which is peculiar in each thing 
from that which it has in common with others, so as 
still to select the most probable, instead of the merely 10 
possible or positively unfit, we shall learn to value 
earnestly and with a practical seriousness a mean, 
already prepared for us by nature and society, of 
teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by 
the same unremembered process and with the same 15 
never forgotten results, as those by. which it is taught 
to speak and converse. Now how much warmer the 
interest is, how much more genial the feelings of 
reality and practicability, and thence how much 
stronger the impulses to imitation are, which a contem- 20 
porary writer, and especially a contemporary poet^ 
excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been 
treated of in the earlier pages of these sketches. I 
have only to add, that all the praise which is due to 
the exertion of such influence for a purpose so impor- 25 
tant, joined with that which must be claimed for the 
infrequency of the same excellence in the same per- 
fection, belongs in full right to Mr. Wordsworth. I 
am far however from denying that we have poets 
whose general style possesses the same excellence, as 30 
Mr. Moore, Lord Byron, Mr. Bowles, and — in all his 
later and more important works — our laurel-honoring 



WORDSWORTH'S POETRY, 5 

Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do 
not appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in 
those of Wordsworth. Quotations or specimens would 
here be wholly out of place, and must be left for the 

5 critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of 
this eulogy so applied. 

The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Words- 
worth's works is a correspondent weight and sanity 
of the thoughts and sentiments, won, not from 

lo books, but from the poet's own meditative observa- 
tion. They are fresh and have the dew upon them. 
His muse, at least when in her strength of wing, and 
when she hovers aloft in her proper element, 

Makes audibly a linked lay of truth, 
Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay, 
15 Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes. 

Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely 
one, which is not rendered valuable by some just and 
original reflection. 

20 Both in respect of this and of the former excel- 
lence, Mr. Wordsworth strikingly resembles Samuel 
Daniel, one of the golden writers of our Elizabethan 
age, now most causelessly neglected : Samuel Daniel, 
whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction 

25 of age : which has been, and as long as our language 
shall last, will be so far the language of the to-day and 
forever, as that it is more intelligible to us, than the 
transitory fashions of our own particular age. A 
similar praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency 

30 of perusal can deprive them of their freshness. For 
though they are brought into the full daylight of every 



6 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

reader's comprehension, yet are they drawn up from 
depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, 
into which few in any age have courage or inclination 
to descend. If Mr. Wordsworth is not equally with 
Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average 5 
understanding in all passages of his works, the com- 
parative difficulty does not arise from the greater 
impurity of the ore, but from the nature and uses 
of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure, 
because it does not aim to be popular. It is enough, 10 
if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is 
written, and 

" Fit audience find, though few." 

To the "Ode on the Intmiations of Immortality 
from Recollections of early Childhood" the poet 15 
might have prefixed the lines which Dante addressed 
to one of his own Canzoni — 

" Canzone, i' credo, che saranno radi 
Color, che tua ragione intendan bene, 
Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto." 20 

'* O lyric song, there will be few, think I, 
Who may thy import understand aright : 
Thou art for them so arduous and so high ! " 

But the ode was intended for such readers only as 
had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of 25 
their inmost nature; to venture at times into the twi- 
light realms of consciousness; and to feel a deep 
interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know 
that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable 
and alien, but which yet cannot be conveyed, save in 30 
symbols of time and space. For such readers the 



WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 7 

sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little dis- 
posed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing the 
Platonic pre-existence, in the ordinary interpretation 
of the words, as I am to believe that Plato himself 

5 ever meant or taught it. 

Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel), the 
sinewy strength and originality of single lines and 
paragraphs : the frequent curiosafelicitas of his diction, 
of which I need not here give specimens, having 

lo anticipated them in a preceding page. This beauty, 
and as eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's 
poetry, his rudest assailants have felt themselves com- 
pelled to acknowledge and admire. 

Fourth, the perfect truth of nature in his images 

15 and descriptions, as taken immediately from nature, and 
proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit 
which gives the physiognomic expression to all the 
works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a 
calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is dis- 

20 tinguished from the reality only by its greater softness 
and luster. Like the moisture or the polish on a 
pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colors its 
objects; but, on the contrary, brings out many a vein 
and many a tint which escape the eye of common 

25 observation; thus raising to the rank of gems, what had 
been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the 
traveler on the dusty high-road of custom. 

Fifth, a meditative pathos, a union of deep and 
subtle thought with sensibility: a sympathy with man 

30 as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, 
rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate {spectator 
haud particeps)^ but of a contemplator from whose 



8 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of 
the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or 
even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face 
divine. The superscription and the image of the 
Creator still remain legible to him under the dark 5 
lines, with which guilt or calamity had canceled or 
cross-barred it. Here the man and the poet lose and 
find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the 
latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic 
pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. lo 
Such as he is^ so he writes. 

Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the 
gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of 
the word. In the play of /(^i/z^j/, Wordsworth, to my 
feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recon- 15 
dite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or de- 
mands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears 
the creature of predetermined research, rather than 
spontaneous presentation. Indeed his fancy seldom 
displays itself as mere and unmodified fancy. But in 20 
imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern 
writers to Shakspeare and Milton; and yet in a kind 
perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his 
own words, which are at once an instance and an illus- 
tration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all 25 
objects 

" add the gleam, 
The light that never was, on sea or land, 
The consecration, and the Poet's dream." 

The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, 30 
appear dim and fantastic, but in reading Bartram's 
Travels I could not help transcribing the following 



THE ROMAJStTiC DRAMA. 9 

lines, as a sort of allegory or connected simile and 
metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius. — 
"The soil is a deep, rich, dark mold, on a deep 
stratum of tenacious clay ; and that on a foundation 

5 of rocks, which often break through both strata, lift- 
ing their backs above the surface. The trees which 
chiefly grow here are the gigantic black oak, magnolia 
grandi-flora, fraxinus excelsior, platane, and a few 
stately tulip trees." * What Mr. Wordsworth Z£////pro- 

lo duce, it is not for me to prophesy ; but I could pro- 
nounce, with the liveliest convictions, what he is 
capable of producing. It is the First Genuine 
Philosophic Poem. — Biographia Literaria^ iii. 485. 

2. THE ROMANTIC DRAMA AND THE NA- 
TURE OF STAGE-ILLUSION. 

I have before spoken of the Romance, or the lan- 

15 guage formed out of the decayed Roman and the 

Northern tongues; and comparing it with the Latin, 

we find it less perfect in simplicity and relation — the 

privileges of a language formed by the mere attraction 

of homogeneous parts — but yet more rich, more ex- 

20 pressive and various, as one formed by more obscure 

affinities out of a chaos of apparently heterogeneous 

atoms. As more than a metaphor — as an analogy of 

this — I have named the true genuine modern poetry 

the romantic; and the works of Shakspeare are 

25 romantic poetry revealing itself in the drama. If the 

tragedies of Sophocles are, in the strict sense of the 

* Travels through North and South Carolina, etc. , and the 
Cherokee country, etc., by W. Bartram, 1792, p. 36. 



XO LITERARY CR ITT CI Sid. 

word, tragedies, and the comedies of Aristophanes 
comedies, we must emancipate ourselves from a false 
association arising from misapplied names, and find a 
new word for the plays of Shakspeare. For they are, 
in the ancient sense, neither tragedies nor comedies, 5 
nor both in one, but a different ^^//^i", diverse in kind, 
and not merely different in degree. They may be 
called romantic dramas, or dramatic romances. 

A deviation from the simple forms and unities of 
the ancient stage is an essential principle and, of 10 
course, an appropriate excellence of the romantic 
drama. For these unities were, to a great extent, the 
natural form of that which, in its elements, was homo- 
geneous, and the representation of which was addressed 
pre-eminently to the outward senses; and though the 15 
fable, the language and the characters appealed to the 
reason rather than to the mere understanding, inas- 
much as they supposed an ideal state rather than 
referred to an existing reality; yet it was a reason 
which was obliged to accommodate itself to the senses, 20 
and so far became a sort of more elevated understand- 
ing. On the other hand, the romantic poetry, the 
Shakspearian drama, appealed to the imagination 
rather than to the senses; and to the reason as con- 
templating our inward nature, and the workings of the 25 
passions in their most retired recesses. But the 
reason, as reason, is independent of time and space: 
it has nothing to do with them; and hence the certain- 
ties of reason have been called eternal truths. As for 
example, the endless properties of the circle: what 30 
connection have they with this or that age, with this 
or that country? The reason is aloof from time and 



THE ROMANTIC DRAMA. II 

space: the imagination is an arbitrary controller over 
both; and if only the poet have such power of excit- 
ing our internal emotions as to make us present to the 
scene in imagination chiefly, he acquires the right 

5 and privilege of using time and space as they exist in 
imagination, and obedient only to the laws by which 
the imagination itself acts. These laws it will be my 
object and aim to point out, as the examples occur 
which illustrate them. But here let me remark (what 

lo can never be too often reflected on by all who would 
intelligently study the works either of the Athenian 
dramatists, or of Shakspeare) that the very essence of 
the former consists in the sternest separation of the 
diverse in kind and the disparate in the degree, whilst 

15 the latter delights in interlacing, by a rainbow-like 
transfusion of hues, the one with the other. 

And here it will be necessary to say a few words on 
the stage and on stage-illusion. 

A theater, in the widest sense of the word, is the gen- 

20 eral term for all places of amusement through the ear or 
eye, in which men assemble in order to be amused by 
some entertainment presented to all at the same time 
and in common. Thus, an old Puritan divine says: 
* 'Those who attend public worship and sermons only to 

25 amuse themselves, make a theater of the church, and 
turn God's house into the devil's. Theatra cedes diabo- 
latriccE^ The most important and dignified species of 
this genus is, doubtless, the stage {res theatralis his- 
trionicd)\ which — in addition to the generic definition 

30 above given — may be characterized in its idea, or 
according to what it does, or ought to, aim at, as a 
combination of several or of all the fine arts in an 



12 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

harmonious whole; having a distinct end of its own, 
to which the peculiar end of each of the component 
arts taken separately, is made subordinate and sub- 
servient; that, namely, of imitating reality — whether 
external things, actions, or passions — under a sem- 5 
blance of reality. Thus, Claude imitates a landscape 
at sunset, but only as a picture ; while a forest-scene 
is not presented to the spectators as a picture, but as 
a forest; and though, in the full scene of the word, we 
are no more deceived by the one than by the other, lo 
yet are our feelings very differently affected; and the 
pleasure derived from the one is not composed of the 
same elements as that afforded by the other, even on 
the supposition that the quantum of both were equal. 
In the former, a picture, it is a condition of all 15 
genuine delight that we should not be deceived; in 
the latter, stage-scenery (inasmuch as its principal end 
is not in or for itself, as is the case in a picture, but to 
be an assistance and means to an end out of itself), its 
very purpose is to produce as much illusion as its 20 
nature permits. These and all other stage presenta- 
tions are to produce a sort of temporary half-faith, 
which the spectator encourages in himself and sup- 
ports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, 
because he knows that it is at all times in his power to 25 
see the thing as it really is. I have often observed 
that little children are actually deceived by stage- 
scenery, never by pictures; though even these produce 
an effect on their impressible minds, which they do 
not on the minds of adults. The child, if strongly 30 
impressed, does not indeed positively think the picture 
to be the reality; but yet he does not think the contrary. 



THE ROMANTIC DRAMA. 13 

As Sir George Beaumont was showing me a very fine 
engraving from Rubens, representing a storm at sea 
without any vessel or boat introduced, my little boy, 
then about five years old, came dancing and singing 

5 into the room, and all at once (if I may so say) 
tumbled in upon the print. He instantly started, stood 
silent and motionless, v/ith the strongest expression, 
first of wonder and then of grief in his eyes and coun- 
tenance, and at length said, *'And where is the ship? 

lo But that is sunk, and the men are all drowned!'* still 
keeping his eyes fixed on the print. Now what 
pictures are to little children, stage-illusion is to men, 
provided they retain any part of the child's sensibility; 
except that, in the latter instance, the suspension of 

15 the act of comparison which permits this sort of negative 
belief, is somewhat more assisted by the will, than in 
that of a child respecting a picture. 

The true stage-illusion in this and in all other things 
consists — not in the mind's judging it to be a forest, 

20 but — in its remission of the judgment that it is not a 
forest. And this subject of stage-illusion is so impor- 
tant, and so many practical errors and false criticisms 
may arise, and indeed have arisen, either from reason- 
ing on it as actual delusion (the strange notion on 

25 which the French critics 'built up their theory, and on 
which the French poets justify the construction of their 
tragedies) ; or from denying it altogether (which seems 
the end of Dr. Johnson's reasoning, and which, as 
extremes meet, would lead to the very same conse- 

3oquences, by excluding whatever would not be judged 
probable by us in our coolest state of feeling, with all 
our faculties in even balance), that these few remarks 



14 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

will, I hope, be pardoned, if they should serve either 
to explain or to illustrate the point. For not only are 
we never absolutely deluded, or anything like it; but 
the attempt to cause the highest delusion possible to 
beings in their senses sitting in a theater, is a gross 5 
fault, incident only to low minds, which, feeling that 
they cannot affect the heart or head permanently, 
endeavor to call forth the momentary affections. 
There ought never to be more pain than is compatible 
with co-existing pleasure, and to be amply repaid by 10 
thought. 

Shakspeare found the infant stage demanding an 
intermixture of ludicrous character, as imperiously as 
that of Greece did the chorus and high language 
accordant. And there are many advantages in this: 15 
a greater assimilation to nature, a greater scope of 
power, more truths, and more feelings: the effects of 
contrast, as in Lear and the Fool; and especially this, 
that the true language of passion becomes sufficiently 
elevated by your having previously heard, in the same 20 
piece, the lighter conversation of men under no strong 
emotion. The very nakedness of the stage, too, was 
advantageous, for the drama thence became some- 
thing between a recitation and a re-presentation ; and 
the absence or paucity of scenes allowed a freedom 25 
from the laws of unity of place and unity of time, the 
observance of which must either confine the drama to 
as few subjects as may be counted on the fingers, or 
involve gross improbabilities, far more striking than the 
violation would have caused. Thence, also, was pre- 30 
eluded the danger of a false ideal — of aiming at more 
than what is possible on the whole, What play of the 



DAN'TE. IS 

ancients, with reference to their ideal, does not hold out 
more glaring absurdities than any in Shakspeare? On 
the Greek plan, a man could more easily be a poet than 
a dramatist: upon our plan, more easily a dramatist 
5 than a poet. — Notes on Shakspeare^ iv. 35. 

3. DANTE—SCHILLER— DON QUIXOTE- 
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER— JON- 
SON— FIELDING— CHAPMAN'S HOMER 
—CHAUCER— CHAUCER AND SHAK- 
SPEARE — MILTON — MILTON AND 
SHAKSPEARE— GIBBON. 

It is impossible to understand the genius of Dante, 
and difficult to understand his poem, without some 
knowledge of the characters, studies, and writings of 
the schoolmen of the twelfth, thirteenth, and four- 

loteenth centuries. For Dante was the living link be- 
tween religion and philosophy: he philosophized the 
religion and christianized the philosophy of Italy; 
and, in this poetic union of religion and philosophy, 
he became the ground of transition into the mixed 

15 Platonism and Aristotelianism of the schools; under 
which, by numerous minute articles of faith and cere- 
mony, Christianity became a craft of hair-splitting, 
and was ultimately degraded into a complete fetisch 
worship, divorced from philosophy, and made up of a 

20 faith without thought, and a credulity directed by pas- 
sion. Afterward, indeed, philosophy revived under 
condition of defending this very superstition; and, in 
so doing, it necessarily led the way to its subversion, 
and that in exact proportion to the influence of the 



16 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

philosophic schools. Hence it did its work most 
completely in Germany, then in England, next in 
France, then in Spain, least of all in Italy. We must, 
therefore, take the poetry of Dante as christianized, 
but without the further Gothic accession of proper 5 
chivalry. It was at a somewhat later period, that the 
importations from the East, through the Venetian 
commerce and the crusading armaments, exercised a 
peculiarly strong influence on Italy. 

In studying Dante, therefore, we must consider 10 
carefully the differences produced, first, by allegory 
being substituted for polytheism ; and secondly and 
mainly, by the opposition of Christianity to the spirit 
of pagan Greece, which receiving the very names of 
its gods from Egypt, soon deprived them of all that 15 
was universal. The Greeks changed the ideas into 
finites, and these finites into anthropomorphic or forms 
of men. Hence their religion, their poetry, nay, their 
very pictures, became statuesque. With them the 
form was the end. The reverse of this was the 20 
natural effect of Christianity; in which finites, even 
the human form, must, in order to satisfy the mind, 
be brought into connection with, and be in fact sym- 
bolical of, the infinite; and must be considered in 
some enduring, however shadowy and indistinct, point 25 
of view, as the vehicle or representative of moral 
truth. 

Hence resulted two great effects : a combination of 
poetry with doctrine ; and, by turning the mind inward 
on its own essence instead of letting it act only on its 30 
outward circumstances and communities, a combina- 
tion of poetry with sentiment. And it is this inward- 



DANTE. 17 

ness or subjectivity, which principally and most 
fundamentally distinguishes all the classic from all 
the modern poetry. Compare the passage in the Iliad 
(Z\ vi. 119-236) in which Diomed and Glaucus 
5 change arms, — 

They took each other by the hand, and pledged friendship — 

with the scene in Ariosto (Orlando Furioso, c. i. st. 
20-22), where Rinaldo and Ferrauto fight and after- 
10 wards make it up: — 

Al Pagan la proposta non dispiacque ; 
Cosi fu differita la tenzone ; 
E tal trecrua tra lor subito nacque, 
Si r odio e V ira va in oblivione, 

15 Che '1 Pagano al partir dalle fresche acque 

Non lascio a piedc il buon figliuol d* Amone ; 
Con preghi invita, c al fin lo toglie in groppa, 
E per r orme d' Angelica ^aloppa. 

Here Homer would have left it. But the Christian 
20 poet has his own feelings to express, and goes on: — 

Oh gran bonta de' cavalieri antiqui ! 
Eran rivali, eran di f^ diversi, 
E si sentian degli aspri colpi iniqui 
Per tutta la persona anco dolersi ; 
25 E pur per selve oscure e calli obbliqui 

Insieme van senza sospetto aversi ! 

And here you will observe, that the reaction of Ari- 
osto' s own feelings on the image or act is more fore- 
grounded (to use a painter's phrase) than the image 
30 or act itself. 

The two different modes in which the imagination 



1 8 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

is acted on by the ancient and modern poetry, may be 
illustrated by the parallel effects caused by the con- 
templation of the Greek or Roman- Greek architecture, 
compared with the Gothic. In the Pantheon, the 
whole is perceived in a perceived harmony with the 5 
parts which compose it; and generally you will 
remember that where the parts preserve any distinct 
individuality, there simple beauty, or beauty simply, 
arises; but where the parts melt undistinguished into 
the whole, there majestic beauty, or majesty, is the 10 
result. In York Minster, the parts, the grotesques, are 
in themselves very sharply distinct and separate, and 
this distinction and separation of the parts is counter- 
balanced only by the multitude and variety of those 
parts, by which the attention is bewildered ; whilst 15 
the whole, or that there is a whole produced, is alto- 
gether a feeling in which the several thousand distinct 
impressions lose themselves as in a universal solvent. 
Hence in a Gothic cathedral, as in a prospect from a 
mountain's top, there is indeed a unity, an awful one- 20 
ness; but it is, because all distinction evades the 
eye. And just such is the distinction between the 
Antigone of Sophocles and the Hamlet of Shak- 
speare. — Lectures^ iv. 289. 



The young men in Germany and England who 25 
admire Lord Byron prefer Goethe to Schiller; but 
you may depend upon it, Goethe does not, nor ever 
will, command the common mind of the people of 
Germany as Schiller does. Schiller had two legiti- 
mate phases in his intellectual character: the first, as 30 



SCHILLER, 19 

author of the Robbers — a piece which must not be 
considered with reference to Shakspeare, but as a work 
of the mere material sublime, and in that line it is 
undoubtedly very powerful indeed. It is quite 

5 genuine, and deeply imbued with Schiller's own soul. 
After this he outgrew the composition of such plays 
as the Robbers, and at once took his true and only 
rightful stand in the grand historical drama, the Wal- 
lenstein: not the intense drama of passion — he was 

10 not master of that — but the diffused drama of history, 
in which alone he had ample scope for his powers. 
The Wallenstein is the greatest of his works : it is not 
unlike Shakspeare's historical plays — a species by itself. 
You may take up any scene, and it will please you by 

15 itself; just as you may in Don Quixote, which you 
read through once or twice only, but which you read 
in repeatedly. After this point it was that Goethe 
and other writers injured, by their theories, the steadi- 
ness and originality of Schiller's mind ; and in every 

20 one of his works, after the Wallenstein, you may per- 
ceive the fluctuations of his taste and principles of 
composition. He got a notion of re-introducing the 
characterlessness of the Greek tragedy with a chorus, 
as in the Bride of Messina, and he was for infusing 

25 more lyric verse into it. Schiller sometimes affected 
to despise the Robbers and the other works of his first 
youth; whereas he ought to have spoken of them as 
of works not in a right line, but full of excellence in 
their way. In his ballads and lighter lyrics, Goethe is 

30 most excellent. It is impossible to praise him too 
highly in this respect. I like the Wilhelm Meister the 
best of his prose works. But neither Schiller's nor 



20 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

Goethe's prose style approaches to Lessing's, whose 
writings, for 7nanner^ are absolutely perfect. — Table 
Talk^ vi. 424. 

During his colloquies with the village-priest and 
the barber-surgeon, in which the fervor of critical 5 
controversy feeds the passion and gives reality to its 
object (what more natural than that the mental striv- 
ing should become an eddy? — madness may perhaps 
be defined as the circling in a stream which should 
be progressive and adaptive) Don Quixote grows at 10 
length to be a man out of his wits. His understanding 
is deranged; and hence without the least deviation 
from the truth of nature, without losing the least trait 
of personal individuality, he becomes a substantial 
living allegory, or personification of the reason and the 15 
moral sense, divested of the judgment and the under- 
standing. Sancho is the converse. He is the com- 
mon sense without reason or imagination ; and Cer- 
vantes not only shows the excellence and power of 
reason in Don Quixote, but in both him and Sancho 20 
the mischiefs resulting from a severance of the two 
main constituents of sound intellectual and moral 
action. Put him and his master together, and they 
form a perfect intellect; but they are separated and 
without cement ; and hence, each having a need of the 25 
other for its own completeness^ each has at times a 
mastery over the other. For the common sense, 
although it may see the practical inapplicability of the 
dictates of the imagination or abstract reason, yet can- 
not help submitting to them. These two characters 30 
possess the world, alternately and interchangeably the 



BE A UMON T AND FLE TCHER, 2 1 

cheater and the cheated. To impersonate them, and 
to combine the permanent with the individual, is one 
of the highest creations of genius, and has been 
achieved by Cervantes and Shakspeare, almost alone. 
5 — Lectures^ iv. 267. 



Beaumont and Fletcher always write as if virtue 
or goodness were a sort of talisman, or strange 
something, that might be lost without the least fault 
on the part of the owner. In short, their chaste 

10 ladies value their chastity as a material thing, — not as 
an act or state of being; and this mere thing being 
imaginary, no wonder that all their women are repre- 
sented with the minds of strumpets, except a few irra- 
tional humorists, far less capable of exciting our sym- 

15 pathy than a Hindoo, who has had a basin of cow- 
broth thrown over him; — for this, though a debasing 
superstition, is still real, and we might pity the poor 
wretch, though we cannot help despising him. But 
Beaumont and Fletcher's Lucinas are clumsy fictions. 

20 It is too plain that the authors had no one idea of 
chastity as a virtue, but only such a conception as a 
blind man might have of the power of seeing, by 
handling an ox's eye. In The Queen of Corinth, in- 
deed, they talk differently ; but it is all talk, and noth- 

25 ing is real in it but the dread of losing a reputation. 
Hence the frightful contrast between their women 
(even those who are meant for virtuous) and Shak- 
speare's. So, for instance, The Maid in the Mill: — a 
woman must not merely have grown old in brothels, 

30 but have chuckled over every abomination committed 



22 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

in them with a rampant sympathy of imagination, to 
have had her fancy so drunk with the minutice of 
lechery as this icy chaste virgin evinces hers to have 
been. 

It would be worth while to note how many of these 5 
plays are founded on rapes, — how many on incestuous 
passions, and how many on mere lunacies. Then their 
virtuous women are either crazy superstitions of a mere 
bodily negation of having been acted on, or strumpets 
in their imaginations and wishes, or, as in this Maid lo 
in the Mill, both at the same time. In the men, the 
love is merely lust in one direction, — exclusive pref- 
erence of one object. The tyrant's speeches are 
mostly taken from the mouths of indignant denoun- 
cers of the tyrant's character, with the substitution of 15 
'T" for "he", and the omission of the prefatory "he 
acts as if he thought" so and so. The only feelings 
they can possibly excite are disgust at the ^ciuses, 
if regarded as sane loyalists, or compassion, if consid- 
ered as Bedlamites. So much for their tragedies. 20 
But even their comedies are, most of them, disturbed 
by the fantasticalness, or gross caricature, of the 
persons or incidents. There are few characters that 
you can really like (even though you should have 
erased from your mind all the filth which bespatters the 25 
most likable of them, as Piniero in The Island Prin- 
cess for instance), scarcely one whom you can love. 
How different this from Shakspeare, who makes one 
have a sort of sneaking affection even for his Bar- 
nardines; whose very lagos and Richards are awful, 30 
and by the counteracting power of profound intellects, 
rendered fearful rather than hateful; and even the 



JON SON, 23 

exceptions, as Goneril and Regan, are proofs of 
superlative judgment and the finest moral tact, in 
being left utter monsters, ntdla virtute redernptce^ and 
in being kept out of sight as much as possible, — they 

5 being, indeed, only means for the excitement and 
deepening of noblest emotions toward the Lear, Cor- 
delia, etc., and employed with the severest economy! 
But even Shakspeare's grossness — that which is really 
so, independently of the increase in modern times of 

10 vicious associations with things indifferent (for there 
is a state of manners conceivable so pure, that the 
language of Hamlet at Ophelia's feet might be a harm- 
less rallying, or playful teasing, of a shame that would 
exist in Paradise) — at the worst, how diverse in kind 

15 is it from Beaumont and Fletcher's ! In Shakspeare it 
is the mere generalities of sex, mere words for the 
most part, seldom or never distinct images, all head- 
work, and fancy-drolleries: there is no sensation sup- 
posed in the speaker. I need not proceed to contrast 

20 this uith Beaumont and Fletcher. — Notes on Beau- 
mont and Fletcher^ iv. 2 1 2 . 



Ben Jonson is original; he is, indeed, the only one 
of the great dramatists of the day who was not either 
directly produced, or very greatly modified, by Shak- 

25 speare. In truth, he differs from our great master in 
everything — in form and in substance — and betrays 
no tokens of his proximity. He is not original in the 
same way as Shakspeare is original ; but after a fashion 
of his own, Ben Jonson is most truly original. 

30 The characters in his plays are, in the strictest sense 
of the term, abstractions. Some very prominent 



24 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

feature is taken from the whole man, and that single 
feature or humor is made the basis upon which the 
entire character is built up. Ben Jonson's dramatis 
personce are almost as fixed as the masks of the ancient 
actors: you know from the first scene — sometimes 5 
from the list of names — exactly what every one of 
them is to be. He was a very accurately observing 
man; but he cared only to observe what was external 
or open to, and likely to impress, the senses. He 
individualizes, not so much, if at all, by the exhibi- lo 
tion of moral or intellectual differences, as by the 
varieties and contrasts of manners, modes of speech 
and tricks of temper; as in such characters as Pun- 
tarvolo, Bobadill, etc. 

I believe there is not one whim or affectation in 15 
common life noted in any memoir of that age, which 
may not be found drawn and framed in some corner or 
other of Ben Jonson's dramas; and they have this 
merit, in common with Hogarth's prints, that not a 
single circumstance is introduced in them which does 20 
not play upon, and help to bring out, the dominant 
humor or humors of the piece. Indeed I ought very 
particularly to call your attention to the extraordinary 
skill shown by Ben Jonson in contriving situations for 
the display of his characters. In fact, his care and 25 
anxiety in this matter led hxm to do what scarcely any 
of the dramatists of that age did — that is, invent his 
plots. It is not a first perusal that suffices for the full 
perception of the elaborate artifice of the plots of the 
Alchemist and the Silent Woman: that of the former 30 
is absolute perfection for a necessary entanglement, 
and an unexpected, yet natural, evolution. 



JON SON. 25 

Ben Jonson exhibits a sterling English diction, and 
he has with great skill contrived varieties of construc- 
tion; but his style is rarely sweet or harmonious, in 
consequence of his labor at point and strength being 

5 so evident. In all his works, in verse or prose, there 
is an extraordinary opulence of thought; but it is the 
produce of an amassing power in the author, and not 
of a growth from within. Indeed a large proportion 
of Ben Jonson*s thoughts may be traced to classic or 

10 obscure modern writers, by those who are learned and 
curious enough to follow the steps of this robust, surly, 
and observing dramatist. — Lectures, iv. 253. 



Caricatures are not less so, because they are found 
existing in real life. Comedy demands characters, and 

15 leaves caricatures to farce. The safest and truest 
defense of old Ben would be to call the Epicene the 
best of farces. The defect in Morose, as in other of 
Jonson's dramatis per sonce, lies in this: — that the acci- 
dent is not a prominence growing out of, and nourished 

20 by, the character which still circulates in it; but that 
the character, such as it is, rises out of, or, rather, 
consists in, the accident. Shakspeare's comic person- 
ages have exquisitely characteristic features: however 
awry, disproportionate, and laughable they may be, 

25 still, like Bardolph's nose, they are features. But 
Jonson's are, either a man with a huge wen, having a 
circulation of its own, and, which we might conceive 
amputated, and the patient thereby losing all his charac- 
ter ; or they are mere wens themselves instead of men, — 

30 wens personified, or with eyes, nose, and mouth cut out, 
mandrake fashion. — Notes on Ben Jonson^ iv. 192. 



26 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

What a master of composition Fielding was ! Upon 
my word, I think the (Edipus Tyrannus, the Alche- 
mist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever 
planned. And how charming, how wholesome. Field- 
ing always is! To take him up after Richardson is 
like emerging from a sick-room heated by stoves into 
an open lawn on a breezy day in May. — Table Talk^ 
vi. 521. 



What is stupidly said of Shakspeare, is really true 
and appropriate of Chapman : mighty faults counter- 10 
poised by mighty beauties. Excepting his quaint 
epithets, which he affects to render literally from the 
Greek, a language above all others blessed in the 
"happy marriage of sweet words," and which in 
our language are mere printer's compound epithets — 15 
such as quaffed &\nvc\^ joy-in-the-heart-of -man-infusing 
wine (the under-marked is to be one word, because 
one sweet mellifluous word expresses it in Homer); — 
excepting this, it has no look, no air of a transla- 
tion. It is as truly an original poem as the Faerie 20 
Queene: it will give you small idea of Homer, 
though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or 
Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. 
For Chapman writes and feels as a poet, — as Homer 
might have wTitten, had he lived in England in the 25 
reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite 
poem, in spite of its frequent and perverse quaint- 
nesses and harshnesses; which are, however, amply 
repaid by almost unexampled sweetness and beauty 
of language, all over spirit and feeling. In the main 30 



CHAUCER AND SHAKSPEARE. ^7 

it is an English heroic poem, the tale of which 
is borrowed from the Greek. — Notes on Chapman's 
Homer ^ iv. 373. 



I think the spirit of the court and nobility of 
5 Edward III. and Richard II. was less gross than that 
in the time of Henry VIII. ; for in this latter period 
the chivalry had evaporated, and the whole coarseness 
was left by itself. Chaucer represents a very high and 
romantic style of society among the gentry. — Table 
10 Talk^ vi. 460. 



I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly 
cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old 
age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how per- 
fectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy 

15 or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with 
the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in 
Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by 
a strong act of imagination and mental metamorpho- 
sis, the last does without any effort, merely by the 

20 inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we 
seem to know Chaucer ! How absolutely nothing do 
we know of Shakspeare! — Table Talk^ vi. 504. 



It is very remarkable that, in no part of his writings, 

does Milton take any notice of the great painters of 

25 Italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art; while every 

other page breathes his love and taste for music. 

Yet it is curious that, in one passage in the Paradise 



28 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

Lost, Milton has certainly copied the fresco of the 
Creation in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. I mean 

those lines, — 

*' now half appear'd 
The tawny lion, pawing to get free 5 

His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, 
And rampant shakes his brinded mane ; " etc., 

an image which the necessities of the painter justified, 
but which was wholly unworthy, in my judgment, of 
the enlarged powers of the poet. Adam bending over 10 
the sleeping Eve, in the Paradise Lost, and Dalilah 
approaching Samson, in the Agonistes, are the only 
two proper pictures I remember in Milton. — Table 
Talk., vi. 409. 

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at 15 
the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is 
the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowl- 
edge, human thoughts, human passions, emotion, lan- 
guage. In Shakspeare's poems the creative power 
and the intellectual energy wrestle in a war embrace. 20 
Each, in its excess of strength, seems to threaten the 
extinction of the other. At length in the drama they 
were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before 
the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, 
that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky 25 
banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix 
reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider 
channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, 
and flow on in one current and with one voice. The 
Venus and Adonis did not perhaps allow the display 30 
of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia 
seems to favor and even demand their intense work- 



MILTON AND SHAKSPEARE. 29 

ings. And yet we find in Shakspeare' s management of 
the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality. 
There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in 
the former poem, in the same vivid colors, inspirited 

5 by the same impetuous vigor of thought, and diverg- 
ing and contracting with the same activity of the 
assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with 
a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge 
and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect 

10 dominion, often domination, over the whole world of 
language. What then shall we say? Even this; that 
Shakspeare — no mere child of nature, no automaton of 
genius, no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by 
the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, 

15 meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowl- 
edge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to 
his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that 
stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no 
equal or second in his own class : to that power, which 

20 seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of 
the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer, not 
rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes 
into all the forms of human character and passion, the 
one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts 

25 all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his 
own ideal. All things and modes of action shape them- 
selves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakspeare 
becomes all things, yet forever remaining himself. 
— Biographia Liter aria ^ iii. 381. 



30 The difference between the composition of a his- 
tory in modern and ancient times is very great; still 



3^ LITERARY CRITICISM. 

there are certain principles upon which a history of a 
modern period may be written, neither sacrificing all 
truth and reality, like Gibbon, nor descending into 
mere biography and anecdote. 

Gibbon's style is detestable; but his style is not the 5 
worst thing about him. His history has proved an 
effectual bar to all real familiarity with the temper and 
habits of imperial Rome. Few persons read the 
original authorities, even those which are classical; 
and certainly no distinct knowledge of the actual state lo 
of the empire can be obtained from Gibbon's rhetori- 
cal sketches. He takes notice of nothing but what may 
produce an effect; he skips from eminence to eminence, 
without ever taking you through the valleys between : 
in fact, his work is little else but a disguised collection 15 
of all the splendid anecdotes which he could find in 
any book concerning any persons or nations, from the 
Antonines to the capture of Constantinople. When I 
read a chapter in Gibbon, I seem to be looking 
through a luminous haze or fog: the figures come and 20 
go, I know not how or why, all larger than life, or dis- 
torted or discolored: nothing is real, vivid, true: all is 
scenical, and, as it were, exhibited by candle-light. 
And then to call it a History of the Decline and Fall 
of the Roman Empire! Was there ever a greater mis- 25 
nomer? I protest I do not remember a single philo- 
sophical attempt made throughout the w^ork, to fathom 
the ultimate causes of the decline or fall of that 
empire. How miserably deficient is the narrative of 
the important reign of Justinian! And that poor 30 
skepticism, which Gibbon mistook for Socratic philos- 
ophy, has led him to misstate and mistake the character 



^HAKSPEARE'S DRAMAS. 3 1 

and influence of Christianity in a way which even an 
avowed infidel or atheist would not and could not have 
done. Gibbon was a man of immense reading, but 
he had no philosophy, and he never fully understood 

5 the principle upon which the best of the old historians 
wrote. He attempted to imitate their artificial con- 
struction of the whole work — their dramatic ordon- 
nance of the parts — without seeing that their histories 
were intended more as documents illustrative of the 

lo truths of political philosophy, than as mere chronicles 
of events. The true key to the declension of the 
Roman empire — which is not to be found in all Gib- 
bon's immense work — may be stated in two words: 
the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroy- 

15 ing, the national character. Rome under Trajan was 
an empire without a nation. — Table Talk^ vi. 474. 

4. CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKSPEARE'S 
DRAMAS— SHAKSPEARE'S JUDGMENT 
EQUAL TO HIS GENIUS — METHOD, 
AS ILLUSTRATED IN SHAKSPEARE— 
SHAKSPEARE'S STYLE — THE CHAR- 
ACTER OF HAMLET — OTHELLO — 
OTHELLO AND HAMLET. 

The stage in Shakspeare*s time was a naked room 
with a blanket for a curtain; but he made it a field 
for monarchs. That law of unity, which has its foun- 
2odations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but 
in nature itself — the unity of feeling — is everywhere and 
at all times observed by Shakspeare in his plays. Read 
Romeo and Juliet: all is youth and spring: — youth 



32 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies: — spring 
with its odors, its flowers, and its transiency. It is one 
and the same feeling that commences, goes through, 
and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and 
the Montagues, are not common old men: they have 5 
an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of 
spring: with Romeo, his change of passion, his 
sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects 
of youth ; while in Juliet love has all that is tender 
and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is volup- lo 
tuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the fresh- 
ness of spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh, like 
the last breeze of the Italian evening. This unity of 
feeling and character pervades every drama of Shak- 
speare. 15 

It seems to me that his plays are distinguished from 
those of all other dramatic poets by the following 
characteristics, 

1. Expectation in preference to surprise. It is like 
the true reading of the passage — *'God said. Let there 20 
be light, and there was light;'' — not there was light. 
As the feeling with which we startle at a shooting star, 
compared with that of watching the sunrise at the pre- 
established moment, such and so low is surprise com- 
pared with expectation. 25 

2. Signal adherence to the great law of nature, that 
all opposites tend to attract and temper each other. 
Passion in Shakspeare generally displays libertinism, 
but involves morality; and if there are exceptions to 
this, they are, independently of their intrinsic value, 30 
all of them indicative of individual character; and, 
like the farewell admonitions of the parent, have an 



^HAlCSPEAkE'S DRAMAS. %% 

end beyond the parental relation. Thus the Coun- 
tess's beautiful precepts to Bertram, by elevating her 
character, raise that of Helena her favorite, and soften 
down the point in her which Shakspeare does not mean 

5 us not to see, but to see and to forgive, and at length 
to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the per- 
sonified memory of wisdom no longer actually pos- 
sessed. This admirable character is always misrepre- 
sented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to 

lo exhibit him as a buffoon ; for although it was" natural 
that Hamlet, — a young man of fire and genius, detest- 
ing formality, and disliking Polonius on political 
grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle 
in his usurpation, — should express himself satiri- 

15 cally, yet this must not be taken as exactly the poet's 
conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration 
of character had arisen^^from long habits of business ; 
but take his advice to Laertes, and Ophelia's rever- 
ence for his memory, and we shall see that he was 

20 meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat 
past his faculties — his recollections of life all full of 
wisdom, and showing a knowledge of human nature, 
whilst what immediately takes place before him, and 
escapes from him, is indicative of weakness. 

25 But as in Homer all the deities are in armor^ even 
Venus ; so in Shakspeare all the characters are strong. 
Hence real folly and dullness are made by him the 
vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one 
being a fool to imitate a fool; but to be, remain, and 

30 speak like a wise man and a great wit, and yet so as to 
give a vivid representation of a veritable fool, — hie 
labor ^ hoc opus est, A drunken constable is not uncom- 



34 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

mon, nor hard to draw; but see and examine what goes 
to make up a Dogberry. 

3. Keeping at all times in the high-road of life. 
Shakspeare has no innocent adulteries, no interest- 
ing incests, no virtuous vice: he never renders that 5 
amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to 
detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like 
Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of the day. 
Shakspeare's fathers are roused by ingratitude, his hus- 
bands stung by unfaithfulness; in him, in short, the 10 
affections are wounded in those points in which all 
may, nay, must, feel. Let the morality of Shakspeare 
be contrasted with that of the writers of his own, or 
the succeeding age, or of those of the present day, 
who boast their superiority in this respect. No one 15 
can dispute that the result of such a comparison is 
altogether in favor of Shakspeare : even the letters of 
women of high rank in his age were often coarser than 
his writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense 
of delicacy, he never injures the mind: he neither 20 
excites, nor flatters passion, in order to degrade the 
subject of it: he does not use the faulty thing for a 
faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare against virtue, 
by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, 
through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the 25 
unfortunate. In Shakspeare vice never walks as in 
twilight: nothing is purposely out of its place: he 
inverts not the order of nature and propriety, — does 
not make every- magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor 
every poor man meek, humane, and temperate: he 30 
has no benevolent butchers, nor any sentimental rat- 
catchers. 



SHAKSPEARE'S DRAMAS. 35 

4. Independence of the dramatic interest on the 
plot. The interest in the plot is always in fact on 
account of the characters, not vice versa ^ as in almost 
all other writers: the plot is a mere canvas and no more. 

5 Hence arises the true justification of the same strata- 
gem being used in regard to Benedict and Beatrice, — 
the vanity in each being alike. Take away from the 
Much Ado About Nothing all that is not indispensable 
to the plot, either as having little to do with it, or, at 

10 best, like Dogberry and his comrades, forced into the 
service, when any other less ingeniously absurd watch- 
men and night-constables would have answered the 
mere necessities of the action: — take away Benedict, 
Beatrice, Dogberry, and the reaction of the former on 

15 the character of Hero, — and what will remain? In 
other writers the main agent of the plot is always the 
prominent character: in Shakspeare it is so, or is not 
so, as the character is in itself calculated, or not cal- 
culated, to form the plot. Don John is the main- 

20 spring of the plot of this play; but he is merely shown 
and then withdrawn. 

5. Independence of the interest on the story as the 
ground-work of the plot. Hence Shakspeare never 
took the trouble of inventing stories. It was enough 

25 for him to select from those that had been already 
invented or recorded such as had one or other, or 
both, of two recommendations; namely, suitableness to 
his particular purpose, and their being parts of popular 
tradition, — names of which we had often heard, and 

30 of their fortunes, and as to which all we wanted was, 
to see the man himself. So it is just the man himself, 
the Lear, the Shylock, the Richard, that Shakspeare 



J 



6 LITERARY CRITICISM. 



makes us for the first time acquainted with. Omit the 
first scene in Lear, and yet everything wili remain; 
so the first and second scenes in the Merchant of 
Venice. Indeed it is universally true. 

6. Interfusion of the lyrical — that which in its very 5 
essence is poetical — not only with the dramatic, as in 
the plays of Metastasio, where at the end of the scene 
comes the aria as the exit speech of the character, — 
but also in and through the dramatic. Songs in 
Shakspeare are introduced as songs only, just as songs lo 
are in real life, beautifully as some of them are char- 
acteristic of the person who has sung or called for 
them; as Desdemona's ** Willow," and Ophelia's wild 
snatches, and the sweet carolings in As You Like It. 
But the whole of the Midsummer Night's Dream is 15 
one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical. 
And observe how exquisitely the dramatic of Hot- 
spur; — 

Many, and I'm glad on't with all my heart ; 

I'd rather be a kitten and cry — mew, etc. 20 

melts away into the lyric of Mortimer; — 

I understand thy looks ; that pretty Welsh 

Which thou pourest down from these swelling heavens, 

I am too perfect in, etc. 

Henry IV, ^ part i. act iii. sc. i. 25 

7. The characters of the dramatis per soncE^ like those 
in real life, are to be inferred by the reader; — they are 
not told to him. And it is worth remarking that 
Shakspeare' s characters, like those in real life, are very 
commonly misunderstood, and almost always under- 30 
stood by different persons in different ways. The 



SHAKSPEARE'S JUDGMENT. 37 

causes are the same in either case. If you take only 
what the friends of the character say, you may be 
deceived, and still more so, if that which his enemies 
say; nay, even the character himself sees himself 

5 through the medium of his character, and not exactly 
as he is. Take all together, not omitting a shrewd 
hint from the clown or the fool, and perhaps your im- 
pression will be right; and you may know whether you 
have in fact discovered the poet's own idea, by all the 

lo speeches receiving light from it, and attesting its 
reality by reflecting it. 

Lastly, in Shakspeare the heterogeneous is united, as 
it is in nature. You must not suppose a pressure or 
passion always acting on or in the character! — passion 

15 in Shakspeare is that by which the individual is distin- 
guished from others, not that which makes a different 
kind of him. Shakspeare followed the main march of 
the human affections. He entered into no analysis 
of the passions or faiths of men, but assured himself 

20 that such and such passions and faiths were grounded 
in our common nature, and not in the mere accidents 
of ignorance or disease. This is an important consid- 
eration and constitutes our Shakspeare the morning 
star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy. 

25 — Notes on Shakspeare^ iv. 60. 



Thus then Shakspeare appears, from his Venus and 

Adonis and Rape of Lucrece alone, apart from his 

great works, to have possessed all the conditions of 

the true poet. Let me now proceed to destroy, as far 

30 as may be in my power, the popular notion that he 



3^ LITERARY CRITICISM, 

was a great dramatist by mere instinct, that he grew 
immortal in his own despite, and sank below men of 
second- or third-rate power, when he attempted aught 
beside the drama — even as bees construct their cells 
and manufacture their honey to admirable perfection ; 5 
but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now this 
mode of reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority 
with a feeling of pride, began in a few pedants, who 
having read that Sophocles was the great model of 
tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its 10 
rules; and finding that the Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and 
other master-pieces were neither in imitation of 
Sophocles, nor in obedience to Aristotle; and not 
having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to 
affirm, that the delight which their country received 15 
from generation to generation, in defiance of the alter- 
ations of circumstances and habits, was wholly ground- 
less ; took upon them, as a happy medium and refuge, 
to talk of Shakspeare as a sort of beautiful lusus naturce^ 
a delightful monster, — wild, indeed, and without 20 
taste or judgment, but like the inspired idiots so much 
venerated in the East, uttering, amid the strangest 
follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of 
ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with 
some epithet of **wild," * 'irregular,** **pure child of 25 
nature,'* etc. If all this be true, we must submit to 
it; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be pain- 
ful to find any excellence, merely human, thrown out 
of all human analogy, and thereby leaving us neither 
rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate. But if 30 
false, it is a dangerous falsehood; for it affords a 
refuge to secret self-conceit, enables a vain man at 



SHAKSPEARE'S JUDGMENT. 39 

once to escape his reader's indignation by general 
swoln panegyrics, and merely by his ipse dixit to treat, 
as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough to 
comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any 

5 reason, or referring his opinion to any demonstrative 
principle; thus leaving Shakspeare as a sort of Grand 
Lama, adored indeed, and his very excrements prized 
as relics, but with no authority or real influence. I 
grieve that every late voluminous edition of his works 

lo would enable me to substantiate the present charge 
with a variety of facts, one tenth of which would of 
themselves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every 
critic who has, or has not, made a collection of black- 
letter books — in itself a useful and respectable amuse- 

15 ment — puts on the seven-league boots of self-opinion, 
and strides at once from an illustrator into a supreme 
judge; and blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce phial 
at the waters of Niagara, and determines positively 
the greatness of the cataract to be neither more nor 

20 less than his three-ounce phial has been able to receive. 

Let me, then, once more submit this question to 

minds emancipated alike from national, or party, or 

sectarian prejudice: — Are the plays of Shakspeare 

works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splen- 

25 dor of the parts compensates, if aught can compensate, 
for the barbarous shapelessness and irregularity of the 
whole? Or is the form equally admirable with the 
matter, and the judgment of the great poet, not less 
deserving our wonder than his genius? Or, again, to 

30 repeat the question in other words: — Is Shakspeare 
a great dramatic poet on account only of those beauties 
and excellences which he possesses in common with the 



40 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

ancients, but with diminished claims to our love and 
honor to the full extent of his differences from them? 
— Or are these very differences additional proofs of 
poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living 
power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism — of free 5 
and rival originality as contra-distinguished from ser- 
vile imitation, or, more accurately, a blind copying of 
effects instead of a true imitation of the essential prin- 
ciples? — Imagine not that I am about to oppose genius 
to rules. No ! the comparative value of these rules is 10 
the very cause to be tried. The spirit of poetry, like 
all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe 
itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. 
It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living 
body is of necessity an organized one; and what is 15 
organization but the connection of parts in and for a 
whole, so that each part is at once end and means? — 
This is no discovery of criticism : it is a necessity of 
the human mind ; and all nations have felt and obeyed 
it, in the invention of meter, and measured sounds, 20 
as the vehicle and involucruni of poetry — itself a fel- 
low-growth from the same life, even as the bark is to 
the tree! 

No work of true genius dares want its appropriate 
form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As 25 
it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is 
even this that constitutes it genius — the power of acting 
creatively under laws of its own origination. How 
then comes it that not only single Zoili^ but whole 
nations have combined in unhesitating condemnation 30 
of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, 
rich in beautiful monsters — as a wild heath where 



SHAKSPkARE'S JUDGMENT, \l 

islands of fertility look the greener from the surround- 
ing waste; where the loveliest plants now shine out 
among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their 
parasitic growth, so interwined that we cannot disen- 

5 tangle the weed without snapping the flower? — In this 
statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse 
of Voltaire,* save as far as his charges are coincident 
with the decisions of Shakspeare's own commentators 
and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous 

10 admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the 
confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. 
The form is mechanic, when on any given material we 
impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising 
out of the properties of the material ; as when to a 

15 mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it 
to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the 
other hand, is innate: it shapes, as it develops, itself 
from within, and the fullness of its development is one 
and the same with the perfection of its outward form. 

20 "^ Take a slight specimen of it : 

Je suis bien loin assurement de justifier en tout la tragedie 
d' Hamlet : c* est une piece grassier e et bar bare, qui ne serait pas sup- 
portee par la plus vile populace de la France et de Vltalie, Ham- 
let y devient fou au second acte, et sa maitresse fole au troisieme ; 

25 le prince tue le pere de sa maitresse, feignant de tuer un rat, et 

. Theroine se jette dans la riviere. On fait sa fosse sur le theatre ; 

des fossoyeurs disent des quolibets dignes d'eux, en tenant dans 

leurs mains des tetes de morts ; le prince Hamlet repond a leurs 

grossih'eth abominables par des folies non moins dSgoiitantes , 

30 Pendant ce temps-la, un des acteurs fait la conquete de la Pologne. 
Hamlet^ sa mere, et son beau-pere boivent ensemble sur le thMtre ; 
on chante a table ^ on s'y querelle, on se bat, on se tue : on croirait 
que cet ouvrage est le fruit de r imagination d'un sauvage ivre. 
Dissertation before Semiramis. 



42 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the 
prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is 
equally inexhaustible in forms. Each exterior is the 
physiognomy of the being within, its true image 
reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror; 5 
and even such is the appropriate excellence of her 
chosen poet, of our own Shakspeare — himself a nature 
humanized, a genial understanding, directing self- 
consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper 
even than our consciousness, 10 

I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general ; 
but as proof positive of his unrivaled excellence, I 
should like to try Shakspeare by this criterion. Make 
out your amplest catalogue of all the human faculties, 
as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the 15 
coincidence of the two (a feeling sui generis et demon- 
stratio demonstratiom^n) called the conscience: the 
understanding or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, 
judgment: then of the objects on which these are to 
be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the 20 
seeming caprices of nature; the realities and the capa- 
bilities, that is, the actual and the ideal, of the human 
mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being, 
as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a 
war-field of temptation ; — and then compare with Shak- 25 
speare under each of these heads all or any of the writers 
in prose and verse that have ever lived ! Who, that is 
competent to judge, doubts the result? And ask your 
own hearts — ask your own common-sense — to conceive 
the possibility of this man — being I say not, the 30 
drunken savage of that wretched socialist, whom 
Frenchmen, to their shame, have honored before their 



SHAKSPEARE'S METHOD. 43 

elder and better worthies — but the anomalous, the wild, 
the irregular, genius of our daily criticism! What! 
are we to have miracles in sport? — Or, I speak rever- 
ently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine 
truths to men? — Notes on Shakspeare^ iv. 50. 



The difference between the products of a well-dis- 
ciplined, and those of an uncultivate dunderstanding, 
in relation to what we will now venture to call the 
science of method, is often and admirably exhibited 

10 by our great dramatist. I scarcely need refer my 
reader to the Clown's evidence, in the first scene of 
the second act of Measure for Measure, or to the 
Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. But not to leave the 
position, without an instance to illustrate it, I will 

15 take the easy-yielding Mrs. Quickly's relation of the 
circumstances of Sir John Falstaff's debt to her: — 

Falstaff. What is the gross sum that I owe thee ? 
Host. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself and the 
money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sit- 

20 ting in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal 
fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun week, when the prince broke 
thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor ; thou 
didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me 
and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it ? Did not 

25 goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me 
gossip Quickly ? — coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar ; telling 
us she had a good dish of prawns ; whereby thou didst desire to 
eat some ; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound ? 
^tc* 

^ ffenry JV,^ Pt. II. act ii. sc. j, 



44 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

And this, be it observed, is so far from being carried 
beyond the bounds of a fair imitation, that the poor 
soul's thoughts and sentences are more closely inter- 
linked than the truth of nature would have required, 
but that the connections and sequence, which the 5 
habit of method can alone give, have in this instance 
a substitute in the fusion of passion. For the 
absence of method, which characterizes the unedu- 
cated, is occasioned by an habitual submission of the 
understanding to mere events and images as such, lo 
and independent of any power in the mind to classify 
or appropriate them. The general accompaniments 
of time and place are the only relations which persons 
of this class appear to regard in their statements. As 
this constitutes their leading feature, the contrary 15 
excellence, as distinguishing the well-educated man, 
must be referred to the contrary habit. Method, 
therefore, becomes natural to the mind which has been 
accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for 
their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the rela- 20 
tion of things; either their relations to each other, or 
to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the 
hearers. To enumerate and analyze these relations, 
with the conditions under which alone they are dis- 
coverable, is to teach the science of method. 25 

The enviable result of this science, when knowledge 
has been ripened into those habits which at once 
secure and evince its possessions, can scarcely be ex- 
hibfted more forcibly as well as more pleasingly, than 
by contrasting with the former extract from Shak-30 
speare the narration, given by Hamlet to Horatio, of 
the occurrences during his proposed transportation 



SHAKSPEARE'S METHOD, 45 

to England, and the events that interrupted his 
voyage: — 

Ham. Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, 
That would not let me sleep : methought, I lay 

5 Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly, 

And praised be rashness for it Let us know, 

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, 

When our deep plots do pall : and that should teach us, 

There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 

lo Rough-hew them how we will. 

HoR. That is most certain. 
Ham. Up from my cabin, 
My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark 
Grop'd I to find out them ; had my desire ; 

15 Finger 'd their packet ; and, in fine, withdrew 

To my own room again : making so bold, 
My fears forgetting manners, to unseal 
Their grand commission ; where I found, Horatio, 
A royal knavery ; an exact command — 

20 Larded with many several sorts of reasons, 

Importing Denmark's health, and England's too, 
With, ho ! such bugs and goblins in my life — 
That, on the supervise, no leisure bated, 
No, not to stay the grinding of the ax, 

25 My head should be struck off ! 

HoR. Is't possible ? 
Ham. Here's the commission ; — read it at more leisure.* 

Here the events, with the circumstances of time and 
place, are all stated with equal compression and 
30 rapidity; not one introduced which could have 
been omitted without injury to the intelligibility of the 
whole process. If any tendency is discoverable, as 
far as the mere facts are in question, it is the tendency 

* Act v. sc, 2. 



4^ LITERARY CRITICISM. 

to omission: and, accordingly, the reader will observe 
in the following quotation that the attention of the 
narrator is called back to one material circumstance, 
which he was hurrying by, by a direct question from 
the friend to whom the story is communicated, **How 5 
was this sealed?'* But by a trait which is indeed 
peculiarly characteristic of Hamlet's mind, ever dis- 
posed to generalize, and meditative if to excess (but 
which, with due abatement and reduction, is distinc- 
tive of every powerful and methodizing intellect), all 10 
the digressions and enlargements consist of reflections, 
truths, and principles of general and permanent inter- 
est, either directly expressed or disguised in playful 
satire. 

I sat me down ; 15 

Devis'd a new commission ; wrote it fair. 
I once did hold it, as our statists do, 
A baseness to write fair, and labored much 
How to forget that learning ; but, sir, now 
It did me yeoman's service. Wilt thou know 20 

The effect of what I wrote ? 

HoR. Ay, good my lord. 

Ham. An earnest conjuration from the king, — 
As England was his faithful tributary ; 

As love between them, like the palm, might flourish ; 25 

As peace should still her wheaten garland wear, 
And stand a comma 'tween their amities. 
And many such like *' as*s " of great charge — 
That on the view and know of these contents, 
Without debatement further, more or less, 30 

He should the bearers put to sudden death, 
No shriving time allowed. 

HoR. How was this sealed ? 

Ham. Why, even in that was heaven ordinat^t 
J h^d my father's signet in my purse, 



SHAKSPEARE'S METHOD. 47 

Which was the model of that Danish seal : 
Folded the writ up in the form of the other : 
Subscribed it ; gave't the impression ; placed it safely, 
The changeling never known. Now, the next day 

5 Was our sea-fight ; and what to this was sequent, 

Thou know'st already. 

HoR. So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to*t ? 
Ham. Why, man, they did make love to this employment ; 
They are not near my conscience : their defeat 

lo Doth by their own insinuation grow. 

'Tis dangerous, when the baser nature comes 
Between the pass and fell incensed points 
Of mighty opposites.* 

It would, perhaps, be sufficient to remark of the 
15 preceding passage, in connection with the humorous 
specimen of narration, 

Fermenting o'er with frothy circumstance, 

in Henry IV., that if, overlooking the different value 
of the matter in each, we considered the form alone, 

20 we should find both immethodical, — Hamlet from the 
excess, Mrs. Quickly from the want, of reflection and 
generalization; and that method, therefore, must result 
from the due mean or. balance between our passive 
impressions and the mind's own reaction on the same. 

25 Whether this re-action do not suppose or imply a pri- 
mary act positively originating in the mind itself, and 
prior to the object in order of nature, though co-in- 
stantaneous with it in its manifestation, will be here- 
after discussed. But I had a further purpose in thus 

30 contrasting these extracts from our myriad-minded 
bard, fxvpiorov'i arrff), I wished to bring forward, 

^Act. V. sg. 2. 



4^ LITERARY CRITICISM, 

each for itself, these two elements of method, or, to 
adopt an arithmetical term, its two main factors. 

Instances of the want of generalization are of no 
rare occurrence in real life; and the narrations of 
Shakspeare's Hostess and the Tapster differ from those 5 
of the ignorant and unthinking in general by their 
superior humor — the poet's own gift and infusion — not 
by their want of method, which is not greater than we 
often meet with in that class, of which they are the 
dramatic representatives. Instances of the opposite 10 
fault, arising from the excess of generalization and 
reflection in minds of the opposite class, will, like the 
minds themselves, occur less frequently in the course 
of our own personal experience. Yet they will not 
have been wanting to our readers, nor will they have 15 
passed unobserved, though the great poet himself (o 
rrjv iavroi) tpvx^v Sxdei vkrfv riva aijoD^arov 
ixopqyai^ TtoiKiXai? jaopcpOiXTa^'^) has more conven- 
iently supplied the illustration. To complete, there- 
fore, the purpose aforementioned — that of presenting 20 
each of the two components as separately as possible — 
I chose an instance in which, by the surplus of its own 
activity, Hamlet's mind disturbs the arrangement, of 
which that very activity had been the cause and 
impulse. 25 

Thus exuberance of mind, on the one hand, inter- 
feres with the forms of method; but sterility of mind, 
on the other, wanting the spring and impulse to mental 
action, is wholly destructive of method itself. For in 
attending too exclusively to the relations which the 30 

* He that molded his own soul, as some incorporeal material, 
into various forms, — Themistius, 



SHAKSPEARE'S METHOD. 49 

past or passing events and objects bear to general 
truth, and the moods of his own thought, the most 
intelligent man is sometimes in danger of overlooking 
that other relation, in which they are likewise to be 

5 placed to the apprehension and sympathies of his 
hearers. His discourse appears like soliloquy inter- 
mixed with dialogue. But the uneducated and unre- 
flecting talker overlooks all mental relations, both logi- 
cal and psychological; and consequently precludes all 

lo method which is not purely accidental. Hence the 
nearer the things and incidents in time and place, the 
more distant, disjointed, and impertinent to each 
other, and to any common purpose, will they appear 
in his narration : and this from the want of a staple, 

15 or starting-post, in the narrator himself; from the 
absence of the leading thought, which, borrowing a 
phrase from the nomenclature of legislation, I may not 
inaptly call the initiative. On the contrary, where the 
habit of method is present and effective, things the 

20 most remote and diverse in time, place, and outward 
circumstance, are brought into mental contiguity and 
succession, the more striking as the less expected. 
But while I would impress the necessity of this habit, 
the illustrations adduced give proof that, in undue pre- 

25 ponderance, and when the prerogative of the mind is 
stretched into despotism, the discourse may degener- 
ate into the grotesque or the fantastical. 

With what a profound insight into the constitution 
of the human soul is this exhibited to us in the char- 

30 acter of the Prince of Denmark, where flying from the 
sense of reality, and seeking a reprieve from the pres- 
sure of its duties in that ideal activity, the overbal- 



so LITERARY CRITICISM. 

ance of which, with the consequent indisposition to 
action, is his disease, he compels the reluctant good 
sense of the high yet healthful-minded Horatio to fol- 
low him in his wayward meditation amid the graves ! 

Ham. To what base uses we may return, Horatio ! Why may 5 
not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it 
stopping a bunghole ? 

HoR. 'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. 

Ham. No, 'faith, not a jot ; but to follow him thither with 
modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it. As thus ; Alexander 10 
died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust ; the 
dust is earth ; of earth we make loam : And why of that loam 
whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel ? 
Imperious Caesar, dead, and turn'd to clay. 
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away ! * 15 

But let it not escape our recollection, that when the 
objects thus connected are proportionate to the con- 
necting energy, relatively to the real, or at least to the 
desirable, sympathies of mankind ; it is from the same 
character that we derive the genial method in the 20 
famous soliloquy, **To be, or not to be"f — which, 
admired as it is, and has been, has yet received only 
the first-fruits of the admiration due to it. 

We have seen that from the confluence of innumer- 
able impressions in each moment of time, the mere 25 
passive memory must needs tend to confusion; a rule, 
the seeming exceptions to which (the thunder-bursts 
in Lear, for instance) are really confirmations of its 
truth. For, in many instances, the predominance of 
some mighty passion takes the place of the guiding 30 
thought, and the result presents the method of nature, 

^ Act V, sc, i^ \ Act iii. sc. i, 



SHAKSPEARE'S METHOD. 5^ 

rather than the habit of the individual. For thought, 
imagination (and I may add, passion), are, in their 
very essence, the first, connective, the latter co-aduna- 
tive: and it has been shown, that if the excess lead to 
5 method misapplied, and to connections of the moment, 
the absence, or marked deficiency, either precludes 
method altogether, both form and substance; or (as 
the following extract will exemplify) retains the out- 
ward form only. 

lo My liege, and Madam, to expostulate 

What majesty should be, what duty is, 

Why day is day, night, night, and time is time. 

Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. 

Therefore — since brevity is the soul of wit, 
15 And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, — ■ 

I will be brief. Your noble son is mad : 

Mad call I it ; for to define true madness. 

What is't, but to be nothing else but mad I 

But let that go. 
20 Queen. More matter with less art. 

Pol. Madam, I swear, I use no art at all. 

That he is mad, 'tis true : 'tis true, 'tis pity : 

And pity 'tis, 'tis true : a foolish figure ; 

But farewell it, for I will use no art. 
25 Mad let us grant him then : and now remains 

That we find out the cause of this effect. 

Or, rather say, the cause of this defect ; 

For this effect defective comes by cause. 

Thus it remains, and the remainder thus 
30 Perpend.* 

Does not the irresistible sense of the ludicrous in 
this flourish of the soul-surviving body of old Polo- 
nius's intellect, not less than in the endless confirma- 

* Act ii. sc. 2. 



%. 



52 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

tions and most undeniable matters of fact of Tapster 
Pompey, or the hostess of the tavern, prove to our feel- 
ings, even before the word is found which presents the 
truth to our understandings, that confusion and for- 
mality are but the opposite poles of the same null- 5 
point? 

It is Shakspeare's peculiar excellence, that through- 
out the whole of his splendid picture-gallery (the reader 
will excuse the acknowledged inadequacy of this meta- 
phor), we find individuality everywhere, mere portrait 10 
nowhere. In all his various characters, we still feel 
ourselves communing with the same nature, which is 
everywhere present as the vegetable sap in the branches, 
sprays, leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruits, their shapes, 
tastes, and odors. Speaking of the effect, that is, his 15 
works themselves, we may define the excellence of 
their method as consisting in that just proportion, that 
union and interpenetration of the universal and the 
particular, which must ever pervade all works of 
decided genius and true science. For method implies 20 
a progressive transition, and it is the meaning of the 
word in the original language. The Greek fxk'^oSo^ 
is literally a way or path of transit. Thus we extol 
the Elements of Euclid, or Socrates' discourse with 
the slave in the Menon of Plato, as methodical; a term 25 
which no one who holds himself bound to think or 
speak correctly, would apply to the alphabetical order 
or arrangement of a common dictionary. But as with- 
out continuous transition there can be no method, so 
without a preconception there can be no transition 30 
with continuity. The term, method, cannot there- 
fore, otherwise than by abuse, be applied to a mere 



SHAKSPEARE'S STYLE. S3 

dead arrangement, containing in itself no principle of 
progression. — The Friend^ ii. 410. 



There's such a divinity doth hedge our Shakspeare 
round, that we cannot even imitate his style. I tried 

5 to imitate his manner in the Remorse, and, when I 
had done, I found I had been tracking Beaumont and 
Fletcher and Massinger instead. It is really very 
curious. At first sight, Shakspeare and his contem- 
porary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike ; 

10 nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and 
the others ; while no one has ever yet produced one 
scene conceived and expressed in the Shakspearian 
idiom. I suppose it is because Shakspeare is universal, 
and, in fact, has no manner; just as you can so much 

15 more readily copy a picture than Nature herself. 
Table Talk^ vi. 427. 



The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakspeare 

and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a 

brick out of a wall with your fore-finger, as attempt to 

20 remove a word out of any of their finished passages. 

— Table Talk^ vi. 467. 



The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and 
character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjec- 
tural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always loth 
25 to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is 
in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly ex- 
plained by the very easy process of setting it down as 
in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon 



54 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irreg- 
ular genius of Shakspeare. The shallow and stupid 
arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I 
would fain do my best to expose. I believe the char- 
acter of Hamlet may be traced to Shakspeare*s deep 5 
and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, 
that this character must have some connection with 
the common fundamental laws of our nature may be 
assumed from the fact, that Hamlet has been the dar- 
ling of every country in which the literature of England 10 
has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is 
essential that we should reflect on the constitution of 
our own minds. Man is distinguished from the brute 
animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: 
but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is 15 
constantly maintained between the impressions from 
outward objects and the inward operations of the in- 
tellect: — for if there be an overbalance in the contem- 
plative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of 
mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. 20 
Now one of Shakspeare* s modes of creating characters 
is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in 
morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakspeare, 
thus mutilated or diseased under given circumstances. 
In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the 25 
moral necessity of a due balance between our attention 
to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the 
workings of our minds, — an equilibrium between the real 
and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance 
is disturbed: his thoughts and the images of his fancy 30 
are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his 
very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium 



THE CHARACTER OF HAMLET. 55 

of his contemplations acquire, as they pass, a form and 
a color not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, 
an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a propor- 
tionate aversion to real action, consequent upon it, 

5 with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. 
This character Shakspeare places in circumstances, 
under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the 
moment. Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but 
he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from 

10 thought, and loses the power of action in the energy 
of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a 
direct contrast to that of Macbeth : the one proceeds 
with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded 
and breathless rapidity. 

15 The effect of this over-balance of the imaginative 
power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting 
broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet's mind, 
which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly 
occupied with the world within, and abstracted from 

2othe world without, — giving substance to shadows, and 
throwing a mist over all common-place actualities. 
It is the nature of thought to be indefinite — definite- 
ness belongs to external imagery alone. Hence it is 
that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight 

25 of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflec- 
tion upon it; — not from the sensuous impression, but 
from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a cele- 
brated waterfall without feeling something akin to 
disappointment : it is only subsequently that the image 

30 comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a 
train of grand or beautiful associations. Hamlet feels 
this; his senses are in a state of trance, and he looks 



56 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

upon external things as hieroglyphics. His soliloquy — 

Oh ! that this too, too solid flesh would melt, etc. 

springs from that craving after the indefinite — for 
that which is not — which most easily besets men of 
genius; and the self-delusion common to this temper 5 
of mind is finely exemplified in the character which 
Hamlet gives of himself* — 

— It cannot be 
But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall 
To make oppression bitter. lo 

He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking of 
them, delays action till action is of no use, and dies 
the victim of mere circumstance and accident. 
—Notes on Shakspeare^ iv. 144. 



Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high 15 
and chivalrous Moorish chief. Shakspeare learned the 
spirit of the character from the Spanish poetry, which 
was prevalent in England in his time. Jealousy does 
not strike me as the point in his passion; I take it to 
be rather an agony that the creature whom he had 20 
believed angelic, with whom he had garnered up his 
heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should 
be proved impure and worthless. It was the struggle 
not to love her. It was a moral indignation and regret 
that virtue should so fall: — **But yet the ///y of it, 25 
lago! — O lago! the pity of it, lago!" In addition 
to this, his honor was concerned: lago would not have 
succeeded but by hinting that his honor was compro- 
mised. There is no ferocity in Othello; his mind is 
majestic and composed. He deliberately determines 30 



OTHELLO AND HAMLET, 57 

to die, and speaks his last speech with a view of show- 
ing his attachment to the Venetian state, though it had 
superseded him. — Table Talk^ vi. 255, 



I have often told you that I do not think there is 

5 any jealousy, properly so called, in the character of 
Othello. There is no predisposition to suspicion, 
which I take to be an essential term in the definition of 
the word. Desdemona very truly told Emilia that he 
was not jealous, that is, of a jealous habit, and he says 

10 so as truly of himself. lago's suggestions, you see, are 
quite new to him; they do not correspond with anything 
of a like nature previously in his mind. If Desdemona 
had, in fact, been guilty, no one would have thought 
of calling Othello's conduct that of a- jealous man. 

15 He could not act otherwise than he did with the lights 
he had; whereas jealousy can never be strictly right. 
See how utterly unlike Othello is to Leontes, in the 
Winter's Tale, or even to Leonatus, in Cymbeline! 
The jealousy of the first proceeds from an evident 

20 trifle, and something like hatred is mingled with it; 
and the conduct of Leonatus in accepting the wager, 
and exposing his wife to the trial, denotes a jealous 
temper already formed. — Table Talk^ vi. 285. 



Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstract- 
25 ing and generalizing habit over the practical. He 
does not want courage, ^kill, will, or opportunity; but 
every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and, 
at the same time, strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all 
the play seems reason itself, should be impelled, at 



5 8 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

last, by mere accident, to effect his object. I have a 
smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so. — Table Talk^ 
vi. 285. 

5. DON JUAN — RACKET'S SERMONS — 
ELEGY — DEFINITION OF FARCE — 
ON STYLE. 

I know nothing that contributes more to a clear in- 
sight into the true nature of any literary phenomenon, 5 
than the comparison of it with some elder production, 
the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent, 
while the difference is real. In the present case this 
opportunity is furnished us by the old Spanish play, 
entitled Atheista Fulminato, formerly, and perhaps 10 
still, acted in the churches and monasteries of Spain; 
and which, under various names (Don Juan, The Liber- 
tine, etc.) has had its day of favor in every country 
throughout Europe. A popularity so extensive, and 
of a work so grotesque and extravagant, claims and 15 
merits philosophical attention and investigation. The 
first point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout 
imaginative. Nothing of it belongs to the real world, 
but the names of the places and persons. The comic 
parts, equally with the tragic; the living, equally with 20 
the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as 
little amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, 
as the Satan of Paradise Lost, or the Caliban of The 
Tempest, and therefore to be understood and judged 
of as impersonated abstractions. Rank, fortune, wit, 25 
talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplish- 
ments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and con- 



DON JUAKK S9 

stitutional hardihood, — all these advantages, elevated 
by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and 
national character, are supposed to have combined in 
Don Juan^ so as to give him the means of carrying 

5 into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a 
godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause 
not only of all things, events, and appearances, but 
likewise of all our thoughts, sensations, impulses and 
actions. Obedience to nature is the only virtue: the 

10 gratification of the passions and appetites her only 
dictate: each individual's self-will the sole organ 
through which nature utters her commands, and 

** Self-contradiction is the only wrong ! 
For, by the laws of spirit, in the right 
Is every individual character 
15 That acts in strict consistence with itself." 

That speculative opinions, however impious and 
daring they may be, are not always followed by cor- 
respondent conducts is most true; as well as that they 

20 can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, 
on account of their unsuitableness to human nature 
and to the institutions of societyc It can be hell^ only 
where it is all hell; and a separate world of devils is 
necessary for the existence of any one complete devil. 

25 But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the 
biography of Carrier and his fellow-atheists before 
us, can it be denied without willful blindness, that the 
(so called) system of nature (that is, materialism, with 
the utter rejection of moral responsibility^ of a present 

30 Providence, and of both present and future retribu- 
tion) may influence the characters and actions of indi- 
viduals, and even of communities, to a degree that 



6o LITERARY CRITICISM. 

almost does away the distinction between men ant 
devilSy and will make the page of the future historian 
resemble the narration of a madman's dreams. It is 
not the wickedness of Don Juan, therefore, which con- 
stitutes the character an abstraction, and removes it 5 
from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession 
of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual 
superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts 
and desirable qualities, as co-existent with entire 
wickedness in one and the same person. But this lo 
likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this 
strange play its charm and universal interest. Don 
Juan is, from beginning to end, an intelligible char- 
acter: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet 
asks only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privi- 15 
leged to ask : namely, that sort of negative faith in the 
existence of such a being, which we willingly give to 
productions professedly ideal; and a disposition to the 
same state of feeling, as that with which we contem- 
plate the idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and 20 
the Farnese Hercules. What the Hercules is to the 
eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is to the mind in 
strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy 
balance of the generic with the individual. The 
former makes the character representative and sym- 25 
bolical, therefore instructive; because, mutatis mu- 
tandis^ it is applicable to whole classes of men. The 
latter gives it living interest; for nothing lives and is 
real, but as definite and individual. To understand 
this completely, the* reader need only recollect the 30 
specific state of his feelings, when in looking at a pic- 
ture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or 



DON JUAN, 6l 

heroic) class, he objects to a particular figure as being 
too much of a portrait ; and this interruption of his 
complacency he feels without the least reference to, 
or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life 

5 whom he might recognize in this figure. It is enough 
that such a figure is not ideal; and therefore not ideal, 
because one of the two factors or elements of the ideal 
is in excess. A similar and more powerful objection 
he would feel toward a set of figures which were mere 

10 abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have 
been called Greek forms and faces; that is, outlines 
drawn according to a recipe. These again are not 
ideal, because in these the other element is in excess. 
^\Forma for^nans per formam for?natam translucens^' 

15 is the definition and perfection of ideal art. 

This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don 
Juan, that it is capable of interesting without poetry, 
nay, even without words, as in our pantomime of that 
name. We see clearly how the character is formed; 

20 and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the 
superhuman entireness of Don Juan's agency, pre- 
vents the wickedness from shocking our minds to any 
painful degree. We do not believe it enough for this 
effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and 

25 negative belief or acquiescence which I have described 
above. Meantime the qualities of his character are 
too desirable, too flattering to our pride arid our wishes, 
not to make up on this side as much additional faith 
as was lost on the other. There is no danger (thinks 

30 the spectator or reader) of my becoming such a mon- 
ster of iniquity as Don Juan! / never shall be an 
atheist ! / shall never disallow all distinction between 



6 2 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

right and wrong! /have not the least inclination to 
be so outrageous a drawcansir in my love affairs! 
But to possess such power of capitivating and enchant^ 
ing the affection of the other sex! — to be capable of 
inspiring in a charming and even virtuous woman all 5 
love so deep, and so entirely personal to me I — that 
even my worst vices (if I were vicious), even my cruelty 
and perfidy (if I were cruel and perfidious), could not 
eradicate the passion ! — to be so loved for my own self^ 
that even with a distinct knowledge of my character, lo 
she yet died to save me! — this, sir, takes hold of two 
sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the 
heroic disinterestedness to which love can transport a 
woman, cannot be contemplated without an honorable 
emotion of reverence toward womanhood: and, on 15 
the other hand, it is among the miseries, and abides in 
the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an out- 
ward confirmation of that something within us, which 
is our very self — that something, not made up of our 
qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and 20 
substantial basis of all these. Love me^ and not my 
qualities, may be a vicious and an insane wish, but it 
is not a wish wholly without a meaning. 

Without power, virtue would be insufficient and in- 
capable of revealing its being. It would resemble the 25 
magic transformation of Tasso's heroine into a tree, 
in which she could only groan and bleed.* Hence 
power is necessarily an object of our desire and of our 
admiration. But of all power, that of the mind is, on 
every account, the grand desideratum of human ambi- 30 

^Gefusalemme Liberata. Canto xiii. st. 38, et seq. 



DON JUAhr, ^i 

tion. We shall be as gods in knowledge, was and 
must have been \h^ first temptation: and the co-exist- 
ence of great intellectual lordship with guilt has never 
been adequately represented without exciting the 

5 strongest interest; and for this reason, that in this bad 
and heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate 
the intellect of man more exclusively as a separate self- 
subsistence, than in its proper state of subordination 
to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely 

lo superior being. 

This is the sacred charm of Shakspeare*s male char- 
acters in general. They are all cast in the mold of 
Shakspeare's own gigantic intellect; and this is the 
open attraction of his Richard, lago, Edmund, and 

15 others in particular. But again; of all intellectual 
power, that of superiority to the fear of the invisible 
world is the most dazzling. Its influence is abun- 
dantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe 
us into a voluntary submission of our better knowledge; 

20 into suspension of all our judgment derived from con- 
stant experience; and enable us to peruse with the 
liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, 
genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so 
deeply rooted in our nature, a specific dramatic prob- 

25 ability may be raised by a true poet, if the whole of his 
work be in harmony; a ^r^/;;^^//<: probability, sufficient 
for dramatic pleasure, even when the component char- 
acters and incidents border on impossibility. The 
poet does not require us to be awake and believe; he 

30 solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream ; and this 
too with our eyes open, and with our judgment /<?r^///<f 
behind the curtain, ready to awaken us at the first 



64 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

motion of our will ; and meantime, only not to dis- 
believe. 

In fine the character of Don John consists in the 
union of everything desirable to human nature, as 
means^ and which heretofore by the well-known law of 5 
association become at length desirable on their own 
account. On their own account and in their own 
dignity, they are here displayed, as being employed to 
Olds so7/;/human, that in the effect, they appear almost 
as means without an end. The ingredients, too, are 10 
mixed in the happiest proportion, so as to uphold and 
relieve each other — more especially in that constant 
interpoise of wit, gayety and social generosity, which 
prevents the criminal, even in his most atrocious 
moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far at 15 
least, as our imagination sits in judgment. Above all, 
the fine suffusion through the whole with the charac- 
teristic manners and feelings of a highly bred gentle- 
man gives life to the drama. Thus having invited the 
statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered, 20 
to supper — which invitation the marble ghost accepted 
by a nod of the head — Don John has prepared a banquet. 

D. John. — Some wine, sirrah ! Here's to Don Pedro's ghost — 
he should have been welcome. 

D. Lop. — The rascal is afraid of you after death. 25 

\One knocks hard at the door. 

D. John. — {to the servant) — Rise and do your duty. 

Serv. Oh the devil, the devil ! {Marble ghost enters. 

D. John. — Ha ! 'tis the ghost ! Let's rise and receive him ! 
Come, Governor, you are welcome, sit there ; if we had thought 30 
you would have come, we would have stayed for you. 

Here, Governor, your health ! Friends, put it about ! Here's 



BACKET'S SERMONS. 65 

excellent meat, taste of this ragout. Come, 111 help you, come 
eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten. 

[ The Ghost threatens him with vengeance, 
D. John. — We are to much confirmed — curse on this dry dis- 
5 course. Come, here's to your mistress, you had one when you 
were living : not forgetting your sweet sister. 

[Dezrils enter. 
D. John. — Are these some of your retinue? Devils, say you? 
I'm sorry I have no burnt brandy to treat 'em with, that's drink 
10 fit for devils, etc. 

Nor is the scene from which we quote interesting in 
dramatic probability alone; it is susceptible likewise 
of a sound moral ; of a moral that has more than com- 
mon claims on the notice of a too numerous class, who 

15 are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly cour- 
age, and scrupulous honor (in all the recognized laws 
of honor) as the substitutes of virtue, instead of its 
ornaments. This, indeed; is the moral value of the 
play at largo, and that which places it at a Avorld/s dis- 

20 tance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. The latter 
introduces to us clumsy copies of these showy instru- 
mental qualities, in order to reconcile us to vice and 
want of principle; while the Atheista Fulminato pre- 
sents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in 

25 all their gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole 
purpose of displaying their hollo wness, and in order to 
put us on our guard by demonstrating their utter in- 
difference to vice and virtue, whenever these and the 
like accomplishments are contemplated for themselves 

30 alone. — Critique on Bertram^ iii. 560. 



Did not the life of Archbishop Williams prove other- 
wise, I should have inferred from these Sermons that 



66 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

Hacket, from his first boyhood, had been used to make 
themes, epigrams, copies of verses, and the like, on 
all the Sunday feasts and festivals of the Church; had 
found abundant nourishment for this humor of points, 
quirks, and quiddities in the study of the Fathers and 5 
glossers; and remained z. junior soph all his life long. 
I scarcely know what to say : on the one hand, there 
is a triflingness, a showman's or relic-hawker's gossip, 
that stands in offensive contrast with the moment- 
ous nature of the subject, and the dignity of the lo 
ministerial office; as if a preacher, having chosen the 
Prophets for his theme, should entertain his congrega- 
tion by exhibiting a traditional shaving-rag of Isaiah's, 
with the Prophet's stubble hair on the dried soap-sud. 
And yet, on the other hand, there is an innocency in 15 
it, a security of faith, a fullness evinced in the play and 
plash of its overflowing, that at other times give one 
the same sort of pleasure as the sight of blackberry 
bushes and children's handkerchief -gardens on the 
slopes of a rampart, the promenade of some peaceful 20 
old town, that stood the last siege in the Thirty Years' 
war. — Literary Remains^ v. 123. 



Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective 
mind. It may treat of any subject, but it must treat 
of no subject /^r itself; but always and exclusively 25 
with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel 
regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow 
and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy 
presents everything as lost and gone, or absent and fu- 
ture. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric 30 



DEFINITION OF FARCE. 67 

epic, in which all is purely external and objective, 
and the poet is a mere voice — Table Talk^ vi. 491. 



The old dramatists took great liberties in respect of 
bringing parties in scene together, and representing 

5 one as not recognizing the other under some faint dis- 
guise. Some of their finest scenes are constructed on 
this ground. Shakspeare avails himself of this artifice 
only twice, I think; in Twelfth Night, where the two 
are with great skill kept apart till the end of the play; 

10 and in the Comedy of Errors, which is a pure farce, 
and should be so consideredc The definition of a farce 
is, an improbability, or even impossibility, granted in 
the outset: see what odd and laughable events will 
fairly follow from it. — Table Talk., vi. 438. 



15 I have, I believe, formerly observed with regard to 
the character of the governments of the P^ast, that 
their tendency was despotic, that is, toward unity; 
while that of the Greek governments, on the other hand, 
leaned to the manifold and the popular, the unity in 

20 them being purely ideal, namely of all as an identifica- 
tion of the whole. In the northern or Gothic nations, 
the aim and purpose of the government were the pres- 
ervation of the rights and interest of the individual, in 
conjunction with those of the whole. The individual 

25 interest was sacred. In the character and tendency of 
the Greek and Gothic languages, there is precisely the 
same relative difference. In Greek, the sentences are 
long and the structure architectural, so that each part 
or clause is insignificant when compared with the 



68 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

whole. The result is everything, the steps and proc- 
esses nothing. But in the Gothic and, generally, in 
what we call the modern, languages, the structure is 
short, simple, and complete in each part, and the con- 
nection of the parts with the sum total of the discourse 5 
is maintained by the sequency of the logic, or the com- 
munity of feelings excited between the writer and his 
readers. As an instance equally delightful and com- 
plete, of what may be called the Gothic structure, as 
contra-distinguished from that of the Greeks, let me lo 
cite a part of our famous Chaucer's character of a 
parish priest as he should be. Can it ever be quoted 
too often ? 

A good man ther was of religioim 

That was a poure Parsone of a toun, 15 

But riche he was of holy thought and werk. 

He was also a lerned man, a clerk, 

That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche ; 

His parishens devoutly wolde he teche. 

Benigne he was, and wonder diligent, 20 

And in adversite ful patient, 

And swiche he was ypreved often sithes. 

Ful loth were him to cursen for his tithes, 

But rather wolde he yeven out of doute 

Unto his poure parishens aboute 25 

Of his offring, and eke of his substance ; 

He coude in litel thing have suffisance. 

Wide was his parish, and houses fer asonder, 

But he ne left nought for no rain ne thonder, 

In sikenesse and in mischief to visite 20 

The ferrest in his parish moche and lite 

Upon his fete, and in his hand a staf. 

This noble ensample to his shepe he yaf, 

That first he wrought, and afterward he taught, 

Out of the gospel he the wordes caught, 



ON STYLE. 69 

And this figure he added yet thereto. 
That if gold ruste, what should iren do. 

He sette not his benefice to hire, 
And lette his shepe accombred in the mire, 

5 And ran unto London unto Seint Poules, 

To seken him a chanterie for soules, 
Or with a brotherhede to be withold, 
But dwelt at home, and kepte wel his fold, 
So that the wolf ne made it no miscarie : 

10 He was a shepherd and not mercenarie. 

And though he holy were and vertuous, 
He was to sinful men not dispitous, 
Ne of his speche dangerous ne digne, 
But in his teching discreet and benigne. 

15 To drawen folk to heven with fairenesse, 

By good ensample was his besinesse. 
But it were any persone obstinat, 
What so he were of high or low estat, 
Him wolde he snibben sharply for the nones : 

20 A better preest I trowe that no wher non is. 

He waited after no pompe ne reverence, 
He maked him no spiced conscience, 
But Cristes love and his apostles' twelve 
He taught, but first he folwed it himselve. 

25 Such change as really took place in the style of our 
literature after Chaucer's time is with difficulty per- 
ceptible, on account of the dearth of writers, during 
the civil wars of the fifteenth century. But the tran- 
sition was not very great; and accordingly we find in 

30 Latimer and our other venerable authors about the time 
of Edward VI. , as in Luther, the general characteristics 
of the earliest manner; — that is, every part popular, 
and the discourse addressed to all degrees of intellect; 
— the sentences short, the tone vehement, and the con- 

35 nection of the whole produced by honesty and single- 



70 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

ness of purpose, intensity of passion, and pervading 
importance of the subject. 

Another and a very different species of style is that 
which was derived from, and founded on, the admir- 
ation and cultivation of the classical writers, and which 5 
was more exclusively addressed to the learned class in 
society. I have previously mentioned Boccaccio as the 
original Italian introducer of this manner, and the great 
models of it in English are Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and 
Taylor, although it may be traced in many other lo 
authors of that age. In all these the language is dig- 
nified but plain, genuine English, although elevated 
and brightened by superiority of intellect in the writer. 
Individual words themselves are always used by them 
in their precise meaning, without either affectation or 15 
slipslopc The letters and state papers of Sir Francis 
Walsingham are remarkable for excellence in style of 
this description. In Jeremy Taylor the sentences are 
often extremely long, and yet are generally so per- 
spicuous in consequence of their logical structure, that 20 
they require no perusal to be understood; and it is for 
the most part the same in Milton and Hooker. 

Take the following sentence as a specimen of the 
sort of style to which I have been alluding: — 

Concerning Faith, the principal object whereof is that eternal 25 
verity which hath discovered the treasures of hidden wisdom in 
Christ ; concerning Hope, the highest object whereof is that ever- 
lasting goodness which in Christ doth quicken the dead ; concern- 
ing Charity, the final object whereof is that incomprehensible 
beauty which shineth in the countenance of Christ, the Son of the 30 
living God : concerning these virtues, the first of which, beginning 
here with a weak apprehension of things not seen, endeth with the 
intuitive vision of God in the world to come ; the second, beginning 



ON- STYLE. 71 

here with a trembling expectation of things far removed, and as 
yet but only heard of, endeth with real and actual fruition of that 
which no tongue can express ; the third, beginning here with a 
weak inclination of heart toward him unto whom we are not able 

5 to approach, endeth with endless union, the mystery whereof is 
higher than the reach of the thoughts of men ; concerning that 
Faith, Hope, and Charity, without which there can be no salvation, 
was there ever any mention made saving only in that Law which 
God himself had from Heaven revealed ? There is not in the 

10 world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of 
these three, more than hath been supernaturally received from the 
mouth of the eternal God. 

Eccles. Pol. i. s. 11. 

The unity in these writers is produced by the unity 
of the subject, and the perpetual growth and evolution 

15 of the thoughts; one generating and explaining and 
justifying the place of another; not, as it is in Seneca, 
where the thoughts, striking as they are, are merely 
strung together like beads, without any causation or pro- 
gression. The words are selected because they are the 

20 most appropriate, regard being had to the dignity of 
the total impression, and no merely big phrases are 
used where plain ones would have sufficed, even in the 
most learned of their works. 

There is some truth in a remark, which I believe 

25 was made by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that the greatest 
man is he who forms the taste of a nation, and that 
the next greatest is he who corrupts it. The true clas- 
sical style of Hooker and his fellows was easily open to 
corruption; and Sir Thomas Browne it was, who, 

30 though a writer of great genius, first effectually injured 
the literary taste of the nation by his introduction of 
learned words, merely because they were learned. It 



72 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

would be difficult to describe Browne adequately; exu- 
berant in conception and conceit, dignified, hyper- 
latinistic, a quiet and sublime enthusiast; yet a fantast, 
a humorist, a brain with a twist; egotistic like Mon- 
taigne, yet with a feeling heart and an active curiosity 5 
which, however, too often degenerates into a hunting 
after oddities. In his Hydriotaphia^ and, indeed, al- 
most all his works, the entireness of his mental action is 
very observable; he metamorphoses everything, be it 
what it may, into the subject under consideration. 10 
But Sir Thomas Browne, with all his faults, had a genu- 
ine idiom ; and it is the existence of an individual idiom 
in each, that ntakes the principal writers before the Re- 
storation the great patterns or integers of English style. 
In them the precise intended meaning of a word can 15 
never be mistaken; whereas in the latter writers, as es- 
pecially in Pope, the use of words is for the most part 
pruely arbitrary, so that the context will rarely show the 
true specific sense, but only that something of the sort 
is designed. A perusal of the authorities cited by 20 
Johnson in his dictionary under any leading word, will 
give you a lively sense of this declension in etymologi- 
cal truth of expression in the writers after the Res- 
toration, or perhaps, strictly, after the middle of the 
reign of Charles II. 25 

The general characteristic of the style of our litera- 
ture down to the period which I have just mentioned, 
was gravity, and in Milton and some other writers of 
his day there are perceptible traces of the sternness of 
republicanism. Soon after the Restoration a material 30 
change took place, and the cause of royalism was 
graced, sometimes disgraced, by every shade of light- 



ON STYLE, 73 

ness of manner. A free and easy style was considered 
as a test of loyalty, or at all events, as a badge of the 
cavalier party; you may detect it occasionally even in 
Barrow, who is, however, in general remarkable for 
5 dignity and logical sequency of expression; but in 
L* Estrange, Collyer, and the writers of that class, 
this easy manner was carried out to the utmost extreme 
of slang and ribaldry. Yet still the works even of these 
last authors, have considerable merit in one point of 
lo view ; their language is level to the understandings of all 
men; it is an actual transcript of the colloquialism of 
the day, and is accordingly full of life and reality. 
Roger North's life of his brother, the Lord Keeper, 
is the most valuable specimen of this class of our Uter- 
is ature; it is delightful, and much beyond any other of 
the writings of his contemporaries. 

From the common opinion, that the English style 
attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen 
Anne's reign, I altogether dissent; not only because it 
20 is in one species alone in which it can be pretended 
that the writers of that age excelled their predecessors; 
but also because the specimens themselves are not 
equal, upon sound principles of judgment, to much 
that had been produced before. The classical struc- 
25 ture of Hooker — the impetuous, thought-agglomerating 
flood of Taylor — to these there is no pretense of a par- 
allel; and for mere ease and grace, is Cowley inferior 
to Addison, being as he is so much more thoughtful 
and full of fancy? Cowley, with the omission of a 
30 quaintness here and there, is probably the best model 
of style for modern imitation in general. Taylor's 
periods have been frequently attempted by his ad- 



74 LITERARY CRITICISM. 

mirers ; you may, perhaps, just catch the turn of a 
simile or single image, but to write in the real manner 
of Jeremy Taylor would require as mighty a mind as 
his. Many parts of Algernon Sidney's treatises afford 
excellent exemplars of a good modern practical style; 5 
and Dryden in his prose works is a still better model, 
if you add a stricter and purer grammar. It is, in- 
deed, worthy of remark that all our great poets have 
been good prose writers, as Chaucer, Spencer, Milton; 
and this probably arose from their just sense of meter. 10 
For a true poet will never confound verse and prose; 
whereas it is almost characteristic of indifferent prose 
writers that they should be constantly slipping into 
scraps of meter. Swift's style is, in its line, perfect; 
the manner is a complete expression of the matter, the 15 
terms appropriate, and the artifice concealed. It is 
simplicity in the true sense of the word. 

After the Revolution, the spirit of the nation became 
much more commercial than it had been before; a 
learned body, or clerisy, as such, gradually disap- 20 
peared, and literature in general began to be addressed 
to the common miscellaneous public. That public had 
become accustomed to, and required, a strong stimu- 
lus; and to meet the requisitions of the public taste, a 
style was produced which by combining triteness of 25 
thought with singularity and excess of manner of ex- 
pression, was calculated at once to soothe ignorance 
and to flatter vanity. The thought was carefully kept 
down to the immediate apprehension of the commonest 
understanding, and the dress was as anxiously arranged 30 
for the purpose of making the thought appear something 
very profound. The essence of this style consisted in 



ON STYLE, 75 

a mock antithesis, that is, an opposition of mere sounds; 
in a rage for personification, the abstract made ani- 
mate, far-fetched metaphors, strange phrases, metrical 
scraps, in everything, in short, but genuine prose. 

5 Style is, of course, nothing else but the art of convey- 
ing the meaning appropriately and with perspicuity, 
whatever that meaning may be; and one criterion of 
style is that it shall not be translatable without injury to 
the meaning. Johnson's style has pleased many from 

lothe very fault of being perpetually translatable; he 
creates an impression of cleverness by never saying any- 
thing in a common way. The best specimen of this 
manner is in Junius, because his antithesis is less 
merely verbal than Johnson's. Gibbon's manner is 

15 the worst of all; it has every fault of which this pecu- 
liar style is capable. Tacitus is an example of it in 
Latin; in coming from Cicero you feel the falsetto im- 
mediately. 

In order to form a good style, the primary rule and 

20 condition is, not to attempt to express ourselves in lan- 
guage before we thoroughly know our own meaning: 
when a man perfectly understands himself, appropriate 
diction will generally be at his command either in writ- 
ing or speaking. In such cases the thoughts and the 

25 words are associated. In the next place preciseness 
in the use of terms is required, and the test is whether 
you can translate the phrase adequately into simpler 
terms, regard being had to the feeling of the whole 
passage. Try this upon Shakspeare, or Milton, and 

30 see if you can substitute other simpler words in any 
given passage without a violation of the meaning or 
tone, The source of bad writing is the desire to b^ 



76 LITERARY CRITICISM, 

something more than a man of sense, — the straining 
to be thought a genius; and it is just the same in 
speech-making. If men would only say what they 
have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent 
they would be ! Another rule is to avoid converting 5 
mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will 
very rarely find, in any great writer before the Revolu- 
tion, the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in 
prose instead of the dependent case; as ''the watch's 
hand,'* for *'the hand of the watch." The possessive 10 
or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least 
to animated subjects. And I cannot conclude this 
Lecture without insisting on the importance of ac- 
curacy of style, as being near akin to veracity and 
truthful habits of mind. He who thinks loosely will 15 
write loosely; and, perhaps, there is some moral in- 
convenience in the common forms of our grammars, 
which give our children so many obscure terms for 
material distinctions. Let me also exhort you to care- 
ful examination of what you read, if it be worth any 20 
perusal at all : such an examination will be a safeguard 
from fanaticism, the universal origin of which is in 
the contemplation of phenomena without investigation 
into their causes. — Lectures^ iv. 337. 



HtttobfoarapbfcaL 

6. THE REV. JAMES BOWYER. 

At school (Christ^s Hospital), I enjoyed the inesti- 
mable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same 
time a very severe, master, the Reverend James Bow- 
yer.* He early molded my taste to the preference 

5 of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus 
to Vergil, and again of Vergil to Ovid. He habituated 
me to compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then 
read), Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of 
Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the so- 

10 called silver and brazen ages, but with even those of the 
Augustan era; and on grounds of plain sense and uni- 
versal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the 
former, in the truth and nativeness both of their 
thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were 

15 studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read 
Shakspeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the 
lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to 
bring up^ so as to escape his censure. I learned from 
him that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seem- 

20 ingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, 
as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because 
more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, 

* See Charles Lamb's ' ' Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years 
ago." 

n 



78 A UTOBIOGRAPHICAL, 

and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he 
would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for 
every word, but for the position of every word ; and I 
well remember that, availing himself of the synonyms 
to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to 5 
show, with regard to each, why it would not have 
answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted 
the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text. 

In our own English compositions (at least for the last 
three years of our school education), he showed no 10 
mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by 
a sound sense, or where the same sense might have 
been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer 
words.* Lute, harp^ and lyre; Muse, Muses, and inspir- 
ations; Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an 15 
abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him 
now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, 
boy, you mean! Muse, boy. Muse? Your nurse's 
daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the 
cloister-pump, I suppose ! * ' Nay, certain introductions, 20 
similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list 
of interdiction. Among the similes, there was, 1 
remember, that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting 
equally well with too many subjects; in which however 
it yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander 25 
and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever 
might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and 

* This is worthy of ranking as a maxim {regula 7naximd) of criti- 
cism. Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the 
same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N. B. 30 
By dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and 4ebasing associ- 
ations. 



THE REV. JAMES BOWYER. 79 

Ciytus ! — Flattery? Alexander and Clytus ! — Anger — 
drunkenness — pride — friendship — ingratitude — late 
repentance?* Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At 
length, the praises of agriculture having been exempli- 

5 fied in the sagacious observation that, had Alexander 
been holding the plow, he would not have run his 
friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried and ser- 
viceable old friend was banished by public edict in 
scecula sceculorum, I have sometimes ventured to think 

lo that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius of 
certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both 
introductory and transitional, including a large as- 
sortment of modest egoisms and flattering illeisms, 
and the like, might be hung up in our Law-courts, 

15 and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage 
to the public, as an important saving of national time, 
an incalculable relief to his Majesty's ministers, but, 
above all, as insuring the thanks of country attorneys, 
and their clients who have private bills to carry through 

20 the House. 

Be this as it may, there was one custom of our 
mastery's which I cannot pass over in silence, because 
I think it imitable and worthy of imitation. He would 
often permit our exercises, under some pretext of want 

25 of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to 

* This lecture he enriched with many valuable quotations from 
the ancients, particularly from Seneca ; who hath, indeed, so well 
handled this passion, that none but a very angry man can read him 
without great pleasure and profit. The Doctor concluded his 
30 harangue with the famous story of Alexander and Clytus ; but, as I 
find that entered in my Common-place under title Drunkenness^ I 
shall not insert it here." The History of a Foundling, by Henry 
Fielding, Book vi. chap, ix, 



8o AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL. 

be looked over. Then placing the whole number 
abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer why this 
or that sentence might not have found as appropriate 
a place under this or that other thesis : and if no satis- 
fying answer could be returned, and two faults of the 5 
same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable 
verdict followed; the exercise was torn up, and another 
on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the 
tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this 
tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even 10 
now, not seldom furnish the dreams, by which the 
blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the pain- 
ful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen 
nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual 
obligations. He sent us to the University excellent 15 
.Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. 
Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good 
gifts which we derived from his zealous and conscien- 
tious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, 
full of years, and full of honors, even of those honors, 20 
which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed 
by that school, and still binding him to the interests of 
that school, in which he had been himself educated, 
and to which during his whole life he was a dedicated 
thing. — Biographia Literaria^ iii. 146. 25 



7. COLERIDGE AND THE TALLOW 
CHANDLER, 

With equal lack of worldly knowledge, I was a far 
more than equal sufferer for it, at the very outset of my 
authorship. Toward the close of the first year from 



THE TALLOW CHANDLER, 8 1 

the time that, in an inauspicious hour, I left the 
friendly cloisters and the happy grove of quiet, ever 
honored Jesus College, Cambridge, I was persuaded 
by sundry philanthropists and Anti-polemists to set on 

5 foot a periodical work, entitled The Watchman, that, 
according to the general motto of the work, all might 
know the truth, and that the truth might make us free! 
In order to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and likewise 
to contribute as little as possible to the supposed guilt 

loof a war against freedom, it was to be published on 
every eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely 
printed, and price only four-pence. Accordingly with 
a flaming prospectus, — ''Knowledge is Power,'' *'To 
cry the state of the political atmosphere,*' — and so 

15 forth, I set off on a tour to the North, from Bristol to 
Sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers; 
preaching by the way in most of the great towns, as an 
hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, 
that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen 

20 on me. For I was at that time and long after, though 
a Trinitarian (that is ad normam Platonis) in philoso- 
phy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion; more accu- 
rately, I was a Psilanthropist, one of those who believe 
our Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who 

25 lay the main stress on the resurrection rather than on 
the crucifixion. O! never can I remember those days 
with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, 
most disinterested. My opinions were indeed, in many 
and most important points, erroneous; but my heart 

30 was single. Wealth, rank, life itself then seemed 
cheap to me, compared with the interests of what I 
believed to be the truth, and the will of my Maker, I 



82 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL. 

cannot even accuse myself of having been actuated 
by vanity; for, in the expansion of my enthusiasm, I did 
not think of myself at all. 

My campaign commenced at Birmingham, and my 
first attack was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow chandler 5 
by trade. He was a tall, dingy man, in whom length 
was so predominant over breadth, that he might have 
been borrowed for a foundry poker. O that face ! a 
face nar'^ Sfxcpaijiyl I have it before me at this mo- 
ment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, pingui-nites- 10 
cent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of 
his thin gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a 
scorched aftermath from a last week's shaving. His 
coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of color and 
luster, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I sup- 15 
pose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward 
at the nape of the neck, — the only approach to flexure 
in his whole figure, — slunk in behind his waistcoat; 
while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with 
strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of 20 
someone looking at me through a used gridiron, all 
soot, grease, and iron! But he was one of the thor- 
ough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and, as I was 
informed, had proved to the satisfaction of many, that 
Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in 25 
The Revelations, that spake as a dragon. A person, 
to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been 
addressed, was my introducer. It was a new event in 
my life, my first stroke in the new business I had 
undertaken of an author, yea, and of an author trading 30 
on his own account. My companion, after some imper- 
fect sentences and a multitude of hums and has, aban- 



THE TALLOW CHANDLER. ^Z 

doned the cause to his client; and I commenced an 
harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros, the tallow- 
chandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut 
of eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declama- 

5 tory, and in the latter from the pathetic to the indig- 
nant. I argued, I described, I promised, I prophe- 
sied; and beginning with the captivity of nations, I 
ended with the near approach of the millennium, 
finishing the whole with some of my own verses 

10 describing that glorious state out of the Religious 
Musings : 

Such delights 
As float to earth, permitted visitants ! 
When in some hour of solemn jubilee 

15 The massive gates of Paradise are thrown 

Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild 
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies, 
And odors snatched from beds of amaranth, 
And they, that from the crystal river of life 

20 Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales ! 

My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and 
praiseworthy patience, though, as I was afterward 
told, on complaining of certain gales that were not alto- 
gether ambrosial, it was a melting day with him. 

25 **And what, sir,'* he said, after a short pause, * 'might 
the cost be?'' * 'Only four-pence,"— (O! how I felt the 
anti-climax, the abyssmal bathos of that four-pence ! ) — 
"only four-pence, sir; each number to be published on 
every eighth day. " — * 'That comes to a deal of money at 

30 the end of a year. And how much, did you say, there 
was to be for the money?" — "Thirty-two pages, sir! 
large octavo, closely printed." — "Thirty and two 



84 A UTOBIOGRAPHICAL. 

pages? Bless me ! why, except what I does in a family 
way on the Sabbath, that's more than I ever reads, 
sir! all the year round. I am as great a one as any 
man in Brummagem, sir! for liberty and truth and all 
them sort of things, but as to this, — no offense, I hope, 5 
sir, — I must beg to be excused.'* — Biographia Liter- 
aria^ iii. 278. 

8. LITERATURE AS A PROFESSION. 

It was a favorite remark of the late Mr. Whit- 
bread's, that no man does anything from a single 
motive. The separate motives, or rather moods of 10 
mind, which produced the preceding reflection and 
anecdotes have been laid open to the reader in each 
separate instance. But an interest in the w^elfare of 
those, who at the present time may be in circumstances 
not dissimilar to my own at my first entrance into life, 15 
has been the constant accompaniment, and (as it were) 
the under-song of all my feelings. Whitehead, exert- 
ing the prerogative of his laureateship, addressed to 
youthful poets a poetic Charge, which is perhaps the 
best, and certainly the most interesting, of his works. 20 
With no other privilege than that of sympathy and 
sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate 
exhortation to the youthful literati^ grounded on my 
own experience. It will be but short; for the begin- 
ning, middle, and end converge to one charge: never 1^ 
pursue literature as a trade. With the exception of one 
extraordinary man, I have never known an individual, 
least of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy 
without 2i profession; that is, some regular employment, 



LITERATURE AS A PROFESSION. 85 

which does not depend on the will of the moment, and 
which can be carried on so far mechanically that an 
average quantum only of health, spirits, and intellec- 
tual exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. 

5 Three hours of leisure, unannoyed by any alien 
anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a change 
and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a 
larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of 
compulsion. Money and immediate reputation form 

10 only an arbitrary and accidental end of literary labor. 
The hope of increasing them by any given exertion will 
often prove a stimulant to industry; but the necessity 
of acquiring them will, in all works of genius, convert 
the stimulant into a narcotic. Motives by excess 

15 reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun 
and stupefy the mind. For it is one contradistinction 
of genius from talent, that its predominant end is always 
comprised in the means; and this is one of the many 
points which establish an analogy between genius and 

20 virtue. Now, though talents may exist without genius, 
yet as genius cannot exist, certainly not manifest 
itself, without talents, I would advise every scholar, 
who feels the genial power working within him, so far 
to make a division between the two, as that he should 

25 devote his talents to the acquirement of competence in 
some known trade or profession, and his genius to 
objects of his tranquil and unbiased choice; while 
the consciousness of being actuated in both alike by 
the sincere desire to perform his duty, will alike en- 

30 noble both. **My dear young friend" (I would say), 
** suppose yourself established in any honorable occu- 
pation. From the manufactory or counting-house, 



86 A VTOBtOGRAPntCAL. 

from the law-court, or from having visited your last 
patient, you return at evening. 

Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home 
Is sweetest 

to your family, prepared for its social enjoyments, with 5 
the very countenances of your wife and children 
brightened, and their voice of welcome made doubly 
welcome, by the knowledge that, as far as they are con- 
cerned, you have satisfied the demands of the day by 
the labor of the day. Then, when you retire into your lo 
study, in the books on your shelves you revisit so 
many venerable friends with whom you can converse; 
your own spirit scarcely less free from personal anxie- 
ties than the great minds, that in those books are still 
living for you. Even your writing-desk, with its blank 15 
paper and all its other implements, will appear as a chain 
of flowers, capable of linking your feelings as well as 
thoughts to events and characters past or to come; not 
a chain of iron, which binds you down to think of the 
future and the remote by recalling the claims and feel- 20 
ings of the peremptory present. But why should I say 
retired The habits of active life and daily intercourse, 
with the study of the world, will tend to give you such 
self-command, that the presence of your family will be 
no interruption. Nay, the social silence or undis- 25 
turbing voices of a wife or sister will be like a restora- 
tive atmosphere, or soft music which molds a dream 
without becoming its object. If facts are required to 
prove the possibility of combining weighty perform- 
ances in literature with full and independent employ- 30 
ment, the works of Cicero and Xenophon among the 



LIT ERA TURE AS A PROFESSION. 87 

ancients; of Sir Thomas More, Bacon, Baxter, or — to 
refer at once to later and contemporary instances — 
Darwin and Roscoe, are at once decisive of the 
question. 

5 But all men may not dare promise themselves a 
sufficiency of self-control for the imitation of those 
examples; though strict scrutiny should always be 
made, whether indolence, restlessness, or a vanity 
impatient for immediate gratification, have not tam- 

10 pered with the judgment and assumed the vizard of 
humility for the purposes of self-delusion. Still the 
Church presents to every man of learning and genius 
a profession, in which he may cherish a rational hope 
of being able to unite the widest schemes of literary 

15 utility with the strictest performance of professional 
duties. Among the numerous blessings of Christianity, 
the introduction of an established Church makes an 
especial claim on the gratitude of scholars and philos- 
ophers; in England, at least, where the principles of 

20 Protestantism have conspired with the freedom of 
the government to double all its salutary powers by 
the removal of its abuses. 

That not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure 
morality, the mere fragments of which 

25 the lofty grave tragedians taught 

In chorus or iambic, teachers best 
Of moral prudence, with delight received 
In brief sententious precepts : 

and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and 

30 attributes which a Plato found most hard to learn and 

deemed it still more difficult to reveal; that these 



SS A UTOBIOGRAPHICAL. 

should have become the almost hereditary property of 
childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; 
that even to the unlettered they sound as common- 
place, is a phenornoion which must withhold all but 
minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the 5 
services even of the pulpit and the reading desk. Yet 
those who confine the efficiency of an established 
Church to its public offices, can hardly be placed in a 
much higher rank of intellect. That to every parish 
throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ lo 
of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a 
nucleus^ round which the capabilities of the place may 
crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to 
excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate 
imitation: this, the unobtrusive, continuous agency of 15 
a Protestant church establishment, this it is, which the 
patriot and the philanthropist, who would fain unite 
the love of peace with the faith in the progressive 
melioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a 
price. // cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir^ with 20 
the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be 
made of coral, or of pearls : for the price of wisdom is 
above rubies. The clergyman is with his parishioners 
and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, 
nor in the wilderness, but a neighbor and a family man, 25 
whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of 
the rich landholder, while his duties make him the fre- 
quent visitor of the farm-house and the cottage. He 
is, or he may become, connected with the families of 
his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the 30 
instances of the blindness, or at best of the short- 
sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, 



LITERATURE AS A PROFESSION. 89 

I know few more striking than the clamors of the farm- 
ers against Church property. Whatever was not paid 
to the clergyman would inevitably, at the next lease, 
be paid to the landholder; while, as the case at present 

5 stands, the revenues of the Church are in some sort 
the reversionary property of every family that may 
have a member educated for the Church, or a daughter 
that may marry a clergyman. Instead of being fore- 
closed and immovable, it is in fact the only species 

10 of landed property that is essentially moving and 
circulative. That there exist no inconveniences, who 
will pretend to assert? But I have yet to expect the 
proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than 
in any other species; or that either the farmers or the 

15 clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to be- 
come either Trullibers or salaried placemen. Nay, I 
do not hesitate to declare my firm persuasion, that 
whatever reason of discontent the farmers may assign, 
the true cause is this: that they may cheat the parson, 

20 but cannot cheat the steward; and that they are dis- 
appointed, if they should have been able to withhold 
only two pounds less than the legal claim, having 
expected to withhold five. At all events, considered 
relatively to the encouragement of learning and genius, 

25 the establishment presents a patronage at once so effect- 
ive and unburdensome, that it would be impossible to 
afford the like or equal in any but a Christian and 
Protestant country. There is scarce a department of 
human knowledge without some bearing on the various 

30 critical, historical, philosophical and moral truths, in 
which the scholar must be interested as a clergyman; 
no one pursuit worthy of a man of genius, which may 



90 A UTOBIOGRAPHICAL. 

not be followed without incongruity. To give the his- 
tory of the Bible as a book^ would be little less than to 
relate the origin, or first excitement, of all the literature 
and science that we now possess. The very decorum 
which the profession imposes is favorable to the best 5 
purposes of genius, and tends to counteract its most 
frequent defects. Finally, that man must be deficient 
in sensibility, who would not find an incentive to emu- 
lation in the great and burning lights, which in a long 
series have illustrated the Church of England ; who lo 
would not hear from within an echo to the voice from 
their sacred shrines, 

Et Pater ^neas et avunculus excitat Hector. 

But, whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the 
advantages are many and important, compared with the 15 
state of a mere literary man, who in any degree 
depends on the sale of his works for the necessaries and 
comforts of life. In the former, a man lives in sym- 
pathy with the world in which he lives. At least he 
acquires a better and quicker tact for the knowledge 20 
of that, with w^hich men in general can sympathize. 
He learns to manage his genius more prudently and 
efficaciously. His powers and acquirements gain him 
likewise more real admiration ; for they surpass the 
legitimate expectations of others. He is something 25 
besides an author, and is not therefore considered 
merely as an author. The hearts of men are open to 
him, as to one of their own class; and whether he 
exerts himself or not in the conversational circles of 
his acquaintance, his silence is not attributed to pride, 30 
nor his communicativeness to vanity. To these advan- 



LITERATURE AS A PROFESSION-. 9^ 

tages I will venture to add a superior chance of hap- 
piness in domestic life, were it only that it is as natural 
for the man to be out of the circle of his household 
during the day, as it is meritorious for the woman to 

5 remain for the most part within it. But this subject 
involves points of consideration so numerous and so 
delicate, and would not only permit, but require such 
ample documents from the biography of literary men, 
that I now merely allude to it in transitu. When the 

10 same circumstance has occurred at very different times 
to very different persons, all of whom have some one 
thing in common; there is reason to suppose that such 
circumstance is not merely attributable to \hQ pei^sons 
concerned, but is in some measure occasioned by the 

15 one point in common to them all. Instead of the 
vehement and almost slanderous dehortation from mar- 
riage which the Misogyne^ Boccaccio, addresses to lit- 
erary men, I would substitute the simple advice: be 
not merely a man of letters ! Let literature be an hon- 

2oorable augmentation to your arms; but not constitute 
the coat, or fill the escutcheon ! 

To objections from conscience I can of course an- 
swer in no other way, than by requesting the youthful 
objector (as I have already done on a former occasion) 

25 to ascertain with strict self-examination, whether other 
influences may not be at work ; whether spirits, ''not of 
health^'' and with whispers '''not from heaven^'' may not 
be walking in the twilight of his consciousness. Let 
him catalogue his scruples, and reduce them to a dis- 

3otinct, intelligible form: let him be certain that he has 
read, with a docile mind and favorable dispositions, the 
best and most fundamental works on the subject; that 



92 A UTOBIOGRAPHICAL, 

he has had both mmd and heart opened to the great 
and illustrious qualities of the many renowned charac- 
ters who had doubted like himself, and whose re- . 
searches had ended in the clear conviction that their 
doubts had been groundless, or at least in no propor- 5 
tion to the counter-weight. Happy will it be for such 
a man if, among his contemporaries elder than himself, 
he should meet with one who, wath similar powers, 
and feelings as acute as his own, had entertained the 
same scruples; had acted upon them; and who by after 10 
research (when the step was, alas! irretrievable, but 
for that very reason his research undeniably disinter- 
ested) had dis< overed himself to have quarreled with 
received opinions only to embrace errors, to have left 
the direction traced out for him on the high-road of 15 
honorable exertion, only to deviate into a labyrinth, 
where when he had wandered till his head was giddy, 
his best good fortune was finally to have found his way 
out again, too late for prudence, though not too late 
for conscience or for truth ! Time spent in such delay 20 
is time won; for manhood in the meantime is advanc- 
ing, and with it increase of knowledge, strength of 
judgment, and above all, temperance of feelings. And 
even if these should effect no change, yet the delay 
will at least prevent the final approval of the decision 25 
from being alloyed by the inward censure of the rash- 
ness and vanity, by which it had been precipitated. 
It would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely less than 
a libel on human nature, to believe that there is any 
established and reputable profession or employment, 30 
in which a man may not continue to act with honesty 
and honor; and doubtless there is likewise none, which 



LITERATURE AS A PROFESSION. 93 

*- 

may not at times present temptations to the contrary. 

But woefully will that man find himself mistaken, who 
imagines that the profession of literature, or (to speak 
more plainly) the trade of authorship, besets its mem- 

5 bers with fewer or with less insidious temptations, than 
the Church, the Law, or the different branches of com- 
merce. But I have treated sufficiently on this unpleas- 
ant subject in an early chapter of this volume. I will 
conclude the present, therefore, with a short extract 

lofrom Herder whose name I might have added to the 
illustrious list of those who have combined the suc- 
cessful pursuit of the Muses, not only with the faith- 
ful discharge, but with the highest honors and honor- 
able emoluments of an established profession. The 

15 translation the reader will find in a note below. "^ ''Am 
sorgfdltigsten^ meiden sie die Aut07'schaft. Zu friih 
oder unmdssig gebraucht^ macht sie den Kopf wusfe und 
das Herz leer; wenn sie auch sonst keine iible Folgen 
gdbe. Ein Mensch. der nur lieset um zu drucketiy lleset 

* TRANSLATION. 

20 " With the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. Too 
early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the 
heart empty ; even were there no other worse consequences. A 
person, who reads only to print, in all probability reads amiss ; 
and he, who sends away through the pen and the press every 

25 thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have 
sent all away, and will become a mere journeyman of the printing- 
office, a compositor r 

To which I may add from myself, that what medical physiolo- 
gists affirm of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts ; 

30 they too must be taken up again into the circulation, and be again 
and again re-secreted in order to insure a healthful vigor, both to 
the mind and to its intellectual offspring. 



94 A UTOBWGRAPHICAL. 

wahrscheinlich ubelj und wer jeden Gedanken^ der ihm 
aufstosst^ durch Feder und Presse versendet^ hat sie in 
kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und wird bald ein blosser 
Diener der Druckereyiy ein Buchstabensetzer wer den.'' — 
Biographia Liter aria^ iii. 314. 5 



lPsi?cbologi? an& ipolftical ant) Social 
pbflosopbi?* 

9. PATRIOTISM AND COSMOPOLITISM. 

The objects of the patriot are, that his countrymen 
should, as far as circumstances permit, enjoy what the 
Creator designed for the enjoyment of animals en- 
dowed with reason; and of course that they should 

5 have it in their power to develop those faculties which 
were given them to be developed. He would do 
his best that every one of his countrymen should 
possess whatever all men may and should possess, 
and that a sufficient number should be enabled and 

10 encouraged to acquire those excellences which, though 
not necessary or possible for all men, are yet to all 
men useful and honorable. He knows that patriotism 
itself is a necessary link in the golden chain of our 
affections and virtues, and turns away with indignant 

15 scorn from the false philosophy or mistaken religion, 

which would persuade him that cosmopolitism is nobler 

than nationality, the human race a sublimer object of 

I love than a people; and that Plato, Luther, Newton, 

P and their equals, formed themselves neither in the 

20 market nor the senate, but in the world, and for all 
men of all ages. True ! But where, and among whom 
are these giant exceptions produced? In the wide 
empires of Asia, where millions of human beings ac- 

95 



9^ PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 

knowledge no other bond but that of a common slavery, 
and are distinguished on the map but by a name which 
themselves perhaps never heard, or hearing abhor? 
No ! in a circle defined by human affections, the first 
firm sod within which becomes sacred beneath the 5 
quickened step of the returning citizen; — here, where 
the powers and interests of men spread without con- 
fusion through a common sphere, like the vibrations 
propagated in the air by a single voice, distinct yet 
coherent, and all uniting to express one thought and lo 
the same feeling; — here, where even the common sol- 
dier dares force a passage for his comrades by gather- 
ing up the bayonets of the enemy into his own breast, 
because his country expected every man to do his duty, 
and this not after he has been hardened by habit, but, 15 
as probably in his first battle; not reckless or hopeless, 
but braving death from a keener sensibility to those 
blessings which make life dear, to those qualities which 
render himself worthy to enjoy them; — here, where the 
royal crown is loved and worshiped as a glory around 20 
the sainted head of freedom ; — where the rustic at his 
plow whistles with equal enthusiasm, "God save the 
King," and "Britons never shall be slaves," or, 
perhaps leaves one thistle unweeded in his garden, 
because it is the symbol of his dear native land; — 25 
here, from within this circle defined, as light by shade, 
or rather as light within light, by its intensity, — here 
alone, and only within these magic circles, rise up the 
awful spirits, whose words are oracles for mankind, 
whose love embraces all countries, and whose voice 30 
sounds through all ages! Here, and here only, may 
we confidently expect those mighty minds to be reared 



PATRIOriSM AMD COSMOPOUTtSM. 97 

and ripened, whose names are naturalized in foreign 
lands, the sure fellow-travelers of civilization, and yet 
render their own country dearer and more proudly 
dear to their own countrymen . This is indeed cosmop- 

5 olitism, at once the nursling and the nurse of patrio- 
\ tic affection. This, and this alone, is genuine philan- 
thropy which, like the olive tree, sacred to concord 
and to wisdom, fattens, not exhausts the soil from 
which it sprang and in which it remains rooted. It 

10 is feebleness only which cannot be generous without 
injustice, or just without ceasing to be generous. Is 
the morning star less brilUant, or does a ray less fall 
on the golden fruitage of the earth, because the moons 
of Saturn too feed their lamps from the same sun? 

15 Even Germany, — though cursed with a base and hateful 
brood of nobles and princelings, cowardly and ravenous 
jackals to the very flocks intrusted to them as to shep- 
herds, who hunt for the tiger and whine and wag their 
tails for his bloody offal— even Germany, the ever- 

2o changing boundaries of which superannuate the last 
year's map, and are altered as easily as the hurdles of 
a temporary sheep-fold, is still remembered with filial 
love and a patriot's pride, when the thoughtful German 
hears the names of Luther and Leibnitz. Ah! why, 

25 he sighs, why for herself in vain should my country 
have produced such a host of immortal minds! Yea, 
even the poor enslaved, degraded, and barbarized Greek 
can still point to the harbor of Tenedos, and say, — 
** There lay our fleet when we were besieging Troy.*' 

30 Reflect a moment on the past history of this wonder- 
ful people. What were they while they remained free 
and independent, — when Greece resembled a collection 



98 PSYCHOLOGY AMD SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 

of mirrors set in a single frame, each having its own 
focus of patriotism, yet all capable, as at Marathon 
and Platea, of converging to one point and of consum- 
ing a common foe? What were they then? The 
fountains of light and civilization, of truth and of 5 
beauty, to all mankind. They were the thinking head, 
the beating heart of the whole world. They lost their 
independence — and with their independence their pa- 
triotism — and became the cosmopolites of antiquity. 
It has been truly observed by the author of the work 10 
for which Palm was murdered, that, after the first act 
of severity, the Romans treated the Greeks not only 
more mildly than their other slaves and dependents, 
but behaved to them even affectionately and with 
munificence. The victor nation felt reverentially the 15 
presence of the visible and invisible deities that gave 
sanctity to every grove, every fountain, and every 
forum. ''Think,** (writes Pliny to one of his friends) 
* 'that you are sent into the province of Achaia, that true 
and genuine Greece, where civilization, letters, even 20 
corn, are believed to have been discovered; that you are 
sent to administer the affairs of free states, that is, to 
men eminently free, who have retained their natural 
right by valor, by services, by friendship, lastly by treaty 
and by religion. Revere the gods their founders, the 25 
sacred influences represented in those gods ; revere 
their ancient glory and this very old age which in man 
is venerable, in cities sacred. Cherish in thyself a 
reverence of antiquity, a reverence for their great 
exploits, a reverence even for their fables. Detract 30 
nothing from the liberty, or the dignity, or even the 
pretensions of any state; keep before thine eyes that 



PATRIOTISM AND COSMOPOLITISM. 99 

this is the land which sent us our institutions, which 
gave us our laws, not after it was subjugated, but in 
compliance with our petition.'* And what came out 
of these men, who were eminently free without patriot- 

5 ism, because without national independence (which 
eminent freedom, however, Pliny himself, in the very 
next sentence, styles the shadow and residuum of 
liberty)? While they were intense patriots, they were 
the benefactors of all mankind, legislators for the very 

lo nation that afterward subdued and enslaved them. 
When, therefore, they became pure cosmopolites, and 
no partial affections interrupted their philanthropy; 
and when yet they retained their country, their lan- 
guage, and their arts, what noble works, what mighty 

15 discoveries may we not expect from them? If the ap- 
plause of a little city — the first-rate town of a country 
not much larger than Yorkshire — and the encourage- 
ment of a Pericles produced a Phidias, a Sophocles, 
and a constellation of other stars scarcely inferior in 

20 glory, what will not the applause of the world effect, 
and the boundless munificence of the world's imperial 
masters? Alas ! no Sophocles appeared, no Phidias was 
born; individual genius fled with national independ- 
ence, and the best products were cold and laborious 

25 copies of what their fathers had thought and invented 
in grandeur and majesty. At length nothing remained 
but dastardly and cunning slaves, who avenged their 
own ruin and degradation by assisting to degrade and 
ruin their conquerors; and the golden harp of their 

30 divine language remained only as the frame on which 
priests and monks spun their dirty cobwebs of sophistry 
and superstition! — The Friend.^ ii. 262, 



lOO PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, 

10. THE EVOLUTION OF MAN. 

Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale 
of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The 
metal, at its height of being, seems a mute prophecy 
of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of 
which it crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the 5 
acme of vegetable life, divides into correspondent 
organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive 
motions and approximations seems impatient of that 
fixure, by which it is differenced in kind from the 
flower-shaped Psyche that flutters with free wing 10 
above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth m 
the irritability, the proper seat of instinct, while yet ^ 
the nascent sensibility is subordinated thereto — most 
wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in the insect, 
and the musco-arterial in the bird, imitate and typi- 15 
cally rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and 
the moral affections and charities, of man. Let us 
carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious week, 
the teeming work-days of the Creator; as they rose in 
vision before the eye of the inspired historian of the 20 
generations of the heavens and of the earthy in the day that 
the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,^ And who 
that hath watched their Avays with an understanding 
heart, could, as the vision evolving still advanced 
toward him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee; the 25 
home-building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and 
above all the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with 
their commonwealths and confederacies, their warriors 

* Gen, ii. 4, 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN. loi 

and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in their tiny 
flocks on the honeyed leaf, and the virgin sisters with 
the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in 
selfless purity — and not say to himself, Behold the 

5 shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from 
behind, in the kindling morn of creation? Thus all 
lower natures find their highest good in semblances 
and seekings of that which is higher and better. All 
things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. 

lo And shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and 
desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the 
reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that 
grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the un- 
stable element beneath it, in neighborhood with the 

15 slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet 
better than itself and more noble, in as far as sub- 
stances that appear as shadows are preferable to 
shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be a 
higher good to make you happy. While you labor for 

20 anything below your proper humanity, you seek a 
happy life in the region of death. Well saith the 
moral poet — 

Unless above himself he can 
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man! 

25 — Aids to Reflection^ i. 180. 

II. DREAMS — THE VISION OF MARTIN 
LUTHER. 

In ordinary dreams we do not judge the objects to 
be real; — we simply do not determine that they are 
unreal. The sensations which they seem to produce 



I02 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, 

are, in truth, the causes and occasions of the images; of 
which there are two obvious proofs: first, that in 
dreams the strangest and most sudden metamorphoses 
do not create any sensation of surprise : and the 
second, that as to the most dreadful images, which 5 
during the dream were accompanied with agonies of 
terror, we merely awake, or turn round on the other 
side, and off fly both image and agony, which would 
be impossible if the sensations were produced by the 
images. This has always appeared to me an absolute lo 
demonstration of the true nature of ghosts and appari- 
tions — such, I mean, of the tribe as were not pure in- 
ventions. Fifty years ago (and to this day in the 
ruder parts of Great Britain and Ireland, in almost 
every kitchen — and in too many parlors it is nearly the 15 
same — ) you might meet persons who would assure you 
in the most solemn manner, so that you could not doubt 
their veracity at least, that they had seen an apparition 
of such and such a person, — in many cases, that the 
apparition had spoken to them; and they would de- 20 
scribe themselves as having been in an agony of terror. 
They would tell you the story in perfect health. Now 
take the other class of facts, in which real ghosts have 
appeared; — I mean, where figures have been dressed 
up for the purpose of passing for apparitions: — in 25 
every instance I have known or heard of (and I have 
collected very many) the consequence has been either 
sudden death, or fits, or idiocy, or mania, or a brain 
fever. Whence comes the difference? Evidently 
from this, — that, in the one case, the whole of the 30 
nervous system has been by slight internal causes grad- 
ually and all together brought into a certain state, the 



DREAMS. 103 

sensation of which is extravagantly exaggerated during 
sleep, and of which the images are the mere effects 
and exponents, as the motions of the weather-cock are 
of the wind; — while in the other case, the image rush- 

5 ing through the sense upon a nervous system, wholly 
unprepared, actually causes the sensation, which is 
sometimes powerful enough to produce a total check, 
and almost always a lesion or inflammation. Who has 
not witnessed the difference in shock when we have 

10 leaped down half-a-dozen steps intentionally, and that 
of having missed a single stair? How comparatively 
severe the latter is ! The fact really is, as to appari- 
tions, that the terror produces the image instead of the 
contrary; iox in omnem actum perceptionis influit imagi- 

\^natio^ as says Wolfe. — Lectures of 1818, iv. 320. 



If this Christian Hercules, this heroic cleanser of 
the Augean stable of apostasy, had been born and 
educated in the present or the preceding generation, 
he would, doubtless, have holden himself for a man of 

20 genius and original power. But with this faith alone, 
he would scarcely have removed the mountains which 
he did remove. The darkness and superstition of the 
age, which required such a reformer, had molded his 
mind for the reception of impressions concerning him- 

25 self, better suited to inspire the strength and enthu- 
siasm necessary for the task of reformation, impres- 
sions more in sympathy with the spirits whom he was 
to influence. He deemed himself gifted with super- 
natural influxes, an especial servant of heaven, a chosen 

30 warrior, fighting as the general of a small but faithful 
troop, against an army of evil beings, headed by the 



104 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 

prince of the air. These were no metaphorical beings 
in his apprehension. He was a poet indeed, as great 
a poet as ever lived in any age or country; but his 
poetic images were so vivid, that they mastered the 
poet's own mind. He was possessed with them, as 5 
with substances distinct from himself: Luther did not 
write, he acted poems. The Bible was a spiritual, 
indeed, but not a figurative armory in his belief; it was 
the magazine of his warlike stores, and from thence he 
was to arm himself, and supply both shield and sword, 10 
and javelin, to the elect. Methinks I see him sitting, 
the heroic student, in his chamber in the Warteburg, 
with his midnight lamp before him, seen by the late 
traveler in the distant plain of Bischofsroda, as a star 
on the mountain ! Below it lies the Hebrew Bible open, 15 
on which he gazes, his brow pressing on his palm, 
brooding over some obscure text, which he desires to 
make plain to the simple boor and to the humble art- 
isan, and to transfer its whole force into their own 
natural and living tongue. And he himself does not 20 
understand it! Thick darkness lies on the original 
text: he counts the letters, he calls up the roots of each 
separate word, and questions them as the familiar 
spirits of an oracle. In vain; thick darkness continues 
to cover it; not a ray of meaning dawns through it. 25 
With sullen and angry hope he reaches for the Vulgate, 
his old and sworn enemy, the treacherous confederate 
of the Roman anti-Christ, which he so gladly, when 
he can, rebukes for idolatrous falsehoods, that had 
dared place 30 

Within the sanctuary itself their shrines, 
Abominations ! 



DREAMS. I OS 

Now — O thought of humiliation! — he must entreat its 
aid. See ! there has the sly spirit of apostasy worked- 
in a phrase, which favors the doctrine of purgatory, the 
intercession of saints, or the efficacy of prayers for the 

5 dead; and what is worst of all, the interpretation is 
plausible. The original Hebrew might be forced into 
this meaning; and no other meaning seems to lie in it, 
none to hover above it in the heights of allegory, none 
to lurk beneath it even in the depths of cabala. This 

lois the work of the tempter; it is a cloud of darkness 
conjured up between the truth of the sacred letters and 
the eyes of his understanding, by the malice of the evil 
one, and for a trial of his faith. Must he then at 
length confess, must he subscribe the name of Luther 

15 to an exposition which consecrates a weapon for the 
hand of the idolatrous hierarchy? Never! never! 

There still remains one auxiliary in reserve, the 
translation of the Seventy. The Alexandrine Greeks, 
anterior to the Church itself, could intend no support 

20 to its corruptions — the Septuagint will have profaned 
the altar of truth with no incense for the nostrils of 
the universal bishop to snuff up. And here again his 
hopes are baffled ! Exactly at this perplexed passage 
had the Greek translator given his understanding a 

25 holiday, and made his pen supply its place. O hon- 
ored Luther ! as easily mightest thou convert the whole 
city of Rome, with the Pope and the conclave of car- 
dinals inclusively, as strike a spark of light from the 
words, and nothing but words, of the Alexandrine 

30 version. Disappointed, despondent, enraged, ceasing 
to think, yet continuing his brain on the stretch in 
solicitation of a thought; and gradually giving himself 



lo6 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, 

up to angry fancies, to recollections of past persecu- 
tions, to uneasy fears and inward defiances and float- 
ing images of the evil being, their supposed personal 
author; he sinks without perceiving it, into a trance 
of slumber; during which his brain retains its waking 5 
energies, excepting that what would have been mere 
thoughts before, now — the action and counterweight of 
his senses and of their impressions being withdrawn — 
shape and condense themselves into things, into reali- 
ities. Repeatedly half-wakening, and his eyelids as 10 
often reclosing, the objects which really surround him 
form the place and scenery of his dream. All at once 
he sees the arch-fiend coming forth on the w^all of the 
room, from the very spot, perhaps, on which his eyes 
had been fixed vacantly during the perplexed moments 15 
of his former meditation : the inkstand which he had at 
the same time been using, becomes associated with it ; 
and in that struggle of rage, which in these distem- 
pered dreams almost constantly precedes the helpless 
terror by the pain of which we are finally awakened, he 20 
imagines that he hurls it at the intruder; or not improb- 
ably in the first instant of awakening, while yet both 
his imagination and his eyes are possessed by the 
dream, he actually hurls it. Some weeks after, per- 
haps, during which interval he had often mused on the 25 
incident, undetermined whether to deem it a visitation 
of Satan to him in the body or out of the body, he dis- 
covers for the first time the dark spot on his wall, and 
receives it as a sign and pledge vouchsafed to him of 
the event having actually taken place. 30 

Such was Luther under the influences of the age and 
country in and for which he was born. Conceive him 



THE VISION OF MARTIN LUTHER. 107 

a citizen of Geneva, and a contemporary of Voltaire; 
suppose the French language his mother-tongue, and 
the political and moral philosophy of English free- 
thinkers re-modeled by Parisian fort esprits.^ to have 

5 been the objects of his study; — conceive this change 
of circumstances, and Luther will no longer dream of 
fiends or of anti-Christ — but will he have no dreams in 
their place? His melancholy will have changed its 
drapery; but will it find no new costume wherewith to 

10 clothe itself? His impetuous temperament, his deep 
working mind, his busy and vivid imaginations — would 
they not have been a trouble to him in a world, where 
nothing was to be altered, where nothing was to obey 
his power, to cease to be that which it had been, in 

15 order to realize his pre-conceptions of what it ought 
to be? His sensibility, which found objects for itself, 
and shadows of human suffering in the harmless brute, 
and even in the flowers which he trod upon — might it 
not naturally, in an unspiritualized age, have wept, and 

20 trembled and dissolved, over scenes of earthly pas- 
sion, and the struggles of love and duty? His pity, 
that so easily passed into rage, would it not have found 
in the inequalities of mankind, in the oppressions of 
governments and the miseries of the governed, an 

25 entire instead of a divided object? And might not a 
perfect constitution, a government of pure reason, a 
renovation of the social contract, have easily supplied 
the place of the reign of Christ in the new Jerusalem, 
of the restoration of the visible Church, and the union 

30 of all men by one faith in one charity? Henceforward, 
then, we will conceive his reason employed in build- 
ing up anew the edifice of earthly society, and his 



lo8 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, 

imagination as pledging itself for the possible realiza- 
tion of the structure. We will lose the great reformer, 
who was born in an age which needed him, in the 
philosopher of Geneva, who was doomed to misapply 
his energies to materials the properties of which he 5 
misunderstood, and happy only that he did not live to 
witness the direful effects of his own system. — The 
Friend^ ii. 131. 



The two following essays I devote to elucidation, 
the first of the theory of Luther's apparitions stated 10 
perhaps too briefly in the preceding essay; the second 
for the purpose of removing the only obstacle, which 
I can discover in the next section of The Friend, to 
the reader's ready comprehension of the principles 
on which the arguments are grounded. First, I will 15 
endeavor to make my ghost theory more clear to those 
of my readers, who are fortunate enough to find it ob- 
scure in consequence of their own good health and 
unshattered nerves. The window of my library at 
Keswick is opposite to the fire-place, and looks out 20 
on the very large garden that occupies the whole slope 
of the hill on which the house stands. Consequently 
the rays of light transmitted through the glass, 
that is, the rays from the garden, the opposite moun- 
tains, and the bridge, river, lake, and vale inter- 25 
jacent, and the rays reflected from it, of the fire- 
place, etc., enter the eye at the same moment. At the 
coming on of evening, it wais my frequent amusement 
to watch the image or reflection of the fire, that seemed 
burning in the bushes or between the trees in different 30 
parts of the garden or the fields beyond it, according 



THE VISION OF MARTIN LUTHER, 109 

as there was more or less light; and which still arranged 
itself among the real objects of vision, with a distance 
and magnitude proportioned to its greater or lesser 
faintness. For still as the darkness increased, the 

5 image of the fire lessened and grew nearer and more 
distinct; till the twilight had deepened into perfect 
night, when all outward objects being excluded, the 
window became a perfect looking-glass : save only that 
my books on the side shelves of the room were lettered, 

10 as it were, on their backs with stars, more or fewer as 
the sky was less or more clouded, the rays of the stars 
being at that time the only ones transmitted. Now 
substitute the phantom from Luther's brain for the 
images of reflected light, the fire for instance, and the 

15 forms of his room and its furniture for the transmitted 
rays, and you have a fair resemblance of an apparition, 
and a just conception of the manner in which it is seen 
together with real objects. I have long wished to de- 
vote an entire work to the subject of dreams, visions, 

20 ghosts, and witch-crafts, in which I might first give, 
and then endeavor to explain, the most interesting and 
best attested fact of each, which has come within my 
knowledge, either from books or from personal testi- 
mony. I might then explain in a more satisfactory 

25 way the mode in which our thoughts, in states of mor- 
bid slumber, become at times perfectly dramatic, — for 
in certain sorts of dreams the dullest wight becomes 
a Shakspeare, — and by what law the form of the vision 
appears to talk to us its own thoughts in a voice as 

30 audible as the shape is visible; and this too oftentimes 
in connected trains, and not seldom even with concen- 
tration of power which may easily impose on the sound- 



no PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, 

est judgments, uninstructed in the optics and acoustics 
of the inner sense, for revelations and gifts of pre- 
science. In aid of the present case, I will only remark, 
that it would appear incredible to persons not accus- 
tomed to these subtle notices of self-observation, what 5 
small and remote resemblances, what mere hints of like- 
ness from some real external object, especially if the 
shape be aided by color, will suffice to make a vivid 
thought consubstantiate with the real object, and derive 
from it an outward perceptibility. Even when we are 10 
broad awake, if we are in anxious expectation, how 
often will not the most confused sounds of nature be 
heard by us as articulate sounds! For instance, the 
babbling of a brook will appear for a moment the voice 
of a friend, for whom we are waiting, calling out our 15 
own names. A short meditation, therefore, on the 
great law of the imagination, that a likeness in part 
tends to become a likeness of the whole, will make 
it not only conceivable, but probable that the ink- 
stand itself, and the dark-colored stone on the wall, 20 
which Luther perhaps had never till then noticed, 
might have a considerable influence in the production 
of the fiend, and of the hostile act by which his 
obtrusive visit was repelled. — The Friend^ ii. 134. 

12. ART AND NATURE. 

As soon as the human mind is inteUigibly addressed 25 
by an outward image exclusively of articulate speech, so 
soon does art commence. But please to observe that I 
iiave laid particular stress on the words **human mind,*' 
meaning to exclude thereby all results common to maa 



ART AND NATURE, HI 

and all other sentient creatures, and consequently 
confining myself to the effect produced by the con- 
gruity of the animal impression with the reflective 
powers of the mind ; so that not the thing presented, 

5 but that which is represented by the thing shall be the 
source of the pleasure. In this sense nature itself is 
to a religious observer the art of God; and for the same 
cause art itself might be defined as of a middle quality 
between a thought and a thing, or, as I said before, the 

lo union and reconciliation of that which is nature with 
that which is exclusively human. It is the figured lan- 
guage of thought, and is distinguished from nature by 
the unity of all the parts in one thought or idea. 
Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a 

15 work of art if we could see the thought which is pres- 
ent at once in the whole and in every part; and a work 
of art will be just in proportion as it adequately con- 
veys the thought, and rich in proportion to the variety 
of parts which it holds in unity. 

20 If, therefore, the term **mute" be taken as opposed 
not to sound but to articulate speech, the old defini- 
tion of painting will in fact be the true and best defini- 
tion of the Fine Arts in general, that is, muta poesis^ 
mute poesy, and so of course poesy. And, as all 

25 languages perfect themselves by a gradual process of 
desnonymizing words orginally equivalent, I have cher- 
ished the wish to use the word ''poesy** as the generic 
or common term, and to distinguish that species of 
poetry which is not muta poesis by its usual name 

30 "poetry;" while of all the other species which collec- 
tively form the Fine Arts, there would remain this as 
thp common definition, — that they all, like poetry, are 



112 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 

to express intellectual purposes, thoughts, conceptions, 
and sentiments which have their origin in the human 
mind; not, however, as poetry does, by means of ar- 
ticulate speech, but as nature or the divine art does, 
by form, color, magnitude, porportion, or by sound, 5 
that is, silently or musically. 

Well! it may be said — but who has ever thought 
otherwise? We all know that art is the imitatress of 
nature. And, doubtless, the truths which I hope to 
convey, would be barren truisms, if all men meant the 10 
same by the words * 'imitate'* and ''nature." But it 
would be flattering mankind at large, to presume that 
such is the fact. First, to imitate. The impression 
on the wax is not an imitation, but a copy, of the seal; 
the seal itself is an imitation. But, further, in order to 15 
form a philosophic conception, we must seek for the 
kind, as the heat in ice, invisible light, etc., whilst, for 
practical purposes, we must have reference to the 
degree. It is sufficient that philosophically we under- 
stand that in all imitation two elements must co-exist, 20 
and not only co-exist, but must be perceived as co- 
existing. These two constituent elements are likeness 
and unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all 
genuine creations of art there must be a union of these 
disparates. The artist may take his point of view 25 
where he pleases, provided that the desired effect be 
perceptibly produced,— that there be likeness in the 
difference, difference in the likeness, and a reconcile- 
ment of both in one. If there be likeness to nature 
without any check of difference, the result is disgust- 30 
ing, and the more complete the delusion, the more 
loathsome the effect. Why are such simulations of 



ART AND NATURE, 1 13 

nature, as wax-work figures of men and women, so dis- 
agreeable? Because, not finding the motion and the 
life which we expected, we are shocked as by a false- 
hood, every circumstance of detail, which before in- 

5 duced us to be interested, making the distance from 
truth more palpable. You set out with a supposed 
reality, and are disappointed and disgusted with the 
deception; whilst, in respect to a work of genuine 
imitation, you begin with an acknowledged total differ- 

loence, and then every touch of nature gives you the 
pleasure of an approximation to truth. The funda- 
mental principle of all this is undoubtedly the horror 
of falsehood and the love of truth inherent in the 
human breast. The Greek tragic dance rested on these 

15 principles, and I can deeply sympathize in imagination 
with the Greeks in this favorite part of their theatrical 
exhibitions, when I call to mind the pleasure I felt in 
beholding the combat of the Horatii and Curiatii 
most exquisitely danced in Italy to the music of 

20 Cimarosa. 

Secondly, as to nature. We must imitate nature! 
yes, but what in nature, — all and everything? No, 
the beautiful in nature. And what then is the beauti- 
ful? What is beauty? It is, in the abstract, the unity 

25 of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse; in the 
concrete, it is the union of the shapely [formosum) with 
the vital. In the dead organic it depends on regularity 
of form, the first and lowest species of which is the 
triangle with all its modifications, as in crystals, archi- 

sotecture, etc.; in the living organic it is not mere regu- 
larity of form, which would produce a sense of form- 
ality; neither is it subservient to anything beside itself. 



114 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 

It may be present in a disagreeable object, in which 
the proportion of the parts constitutes a whole; it does 
not arise from association, as the agreeable does, but 
sometimes lies in the rupture of association ; it is not 
different to different individuals and nations, as has 5 
been said, nor is it connected with the ideas of the 
good, or the fit, or the useful. The sense of beauty 
is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure 
without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to, 
interest. 10 

If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura 
naturata^ what idle rivalry ! If he proceeds only from 
a given form, which is supposed to answer to the 
notion of beauty, what an emptiness, what an unreality 
there always is in his productions, as in Cipriani's pic- 15 
tures! Believe me, you must master the essence, the 
natura natu7'ans^ which presupposes a bond between 
nature in the higher sense and the soul of man. 

The wisdom in nature is distinguished from that in 
man, by the co-instantaneity of the plan and the execu- 20 
tion; the thought and the product are one, or are given 
at once; but there is no reflex act, and hence there is 
no moral responsibility. In man there is reflection, 
freedom, and choice ; he is, therefore, the head of the 
visible creation. In the objects of nature are presented, 25 
as in a mirror, all the possible elements, steps, and 
processes of intellect antecedent to consciousness, and 
therefore to the full development of the intelligential 
act; and man's mind is the very focus of all the rays 
of intellect which are scattered throughout the images 30 
of nature. Noav so to place these images, totalized, 
and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit 



ART AND NATURE, 115 

from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves 
the moral reflections to which they approximate; to 
make the external internal, the internal external; to 
make nature thought, and thought nature, — this is the 

5 mystery of genius in the Fine Arts. Dare I add that 
the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but 
a striving to become mind, that it is mind in its 
essence? 

In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the 

10 external with the internal; the conscious is so impressed 
on the unconscious as to appear in it; as compare mere 
letters inscribed on a tomb with figures themselves 
constituting the tomb. He who combines the two is 
the man of genius; and for that reason he must partake 

15 of both. Hence there is in genius itself an uncon- 
scious activity; nay, that is the genius in the man of 
genius. And this is the true exposition of the rule that 
the artist must first eloign himself from nature in order 
to return to her with full effect. Why this? Because 

20 if he were to begin by mere painful copying, he would 
produce masks only, not forms breathing life. He 
must out of his own mind create forms according to 
the severe laws of the intellect, in order to generate in 
himself that co-ordination of freedom and law, that 

25 involution of obedience in the prescript, and of the 
prescript in the impulse to obey, which assimilates 
him to nature, and enables him to understand her. 
He merely absents himself for a season from her, 
that his own spirit, which has the same ground with 

30 nature, may learn her unspoken language in its main 
radicals, before he approaches to her endless com- 
positions of them. Yes, not to acquire cold notions — 



Ii6 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PFIILOSOPHY. 

lifeless technical rules — but living and life-produc- 
ing ideas, which shall contain their own evidence, 
the certainty that they are essentially one with the 
germinal causes in nature — his consciousness being 
the focus and mirror of both, — for this does the 5 
artist for a time abandon the external real in order to 
return to it with a complete sympathy with its internal 
and actual. For of all we see, hear, feel, and touch the 
substance is and must be in ourselves; and therefore 
there is no alternative in reason between the dreary ic 
(and thank Heaven ! ahnost impossible) belief that 
everything around us is but a phantom, or that the 
life which is in us is in them likewise; and that to know 
is to resemble, when we speak of objects out of our- 
selves; even as, within ourselves, to learn is, according 15 
to Plato, only to recollect; — the only effective answer 
to which, that I have been fortunate enough to meet 
with, is that which Pope has consecrated for future 
use in the line — 

And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin. 20 

The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, 
that which is active through form and figure, and dis- 
courses to us by symbols — the Natur-geist^ or spirit of 
nature — as we unconsciously imitate those whom we 
love; for so only can he hope to produce any work truly 25 
natural in the object and truly human in the effect. 
The idea which puts the form together cannot itself 
be the form. It is above form, and is its essence, the 
universal in the individual, or the individuality itself, 
— the glance and the exponent of the indwelling 30 
power. — Lectiwes ^1818, i v. 329. 



TOLERATION. 117 

13. TOLERATION. 

But notwithstanding this deep conviction of our 
general fallibility, and the most vivid recollection of 
my own, I dare avow with the German philosopher, 
that as far as opinions, and not motives, principles, 

5 and not men, are concerned, I neither am tolerant, 
nor wish to be regarded as such. According to my 
judgment, it is mere ostentation, or a poor trick that 
hypocrisy plays with the cards of nonsense, when a 
man makes protestation of being perfectly tolerant in 

10 respect of all principles, opinions, and persuasions, 
those alone excepted which render the holders intoler- 
ant. For he either means to say by this, that he is 
utterly indifferent toward all truth, and finds nothing 
so insufferable as the persuasion of there being any 

15 such mighty value or importance attached to the pos- 
session of the truth as should give a marked prefer- 
ence to any one conviction above any other ; or else 
he means nothing, and amuses himself with articulating 
the pulses of the air instead of inhaling it in the more 

20 healthful and profitable exercise of yawning. That 
which doth not withstand, hath itself no standing 
place. To fill a station is to exclude or repel others, — 
and this is not less the definition of moral, than of 
material solidity. We live by continued acts of de- 

25 fense that involve a sort of offensive warfare. But 
a man's principles, on which he grounds his hope and 
his faith, are the life of his life. We live by faith ^ says 
the philosophic Apostle ; and faith without principles is 
but a flattering phrase for willful positiveness, or fanat- 

3oical bodily sensation. Well, and of good right there- 



Ii8 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, 

fore, do we maintain with more zeal, than we should 
defend body or estate, a deep and inward conviction, 
which is as the moon to us; and like the moon with all 
its massy shadows and deceptive gleams, it yet lights us 
on our way, poor travelers as we are, and benighted 5 
pilgrims. With all its spots and changes and tempo- 
rary eclipses, with all its vain halos and bedimming 
vapors, it yet reflects the light that is to rise on us, 
which even now is rising, though intercepted from 
our immediate view by the mountains that inclose and 10 
frown over the vale of our mortal life. 

This again is the mystery and the dignity of our 
human nature, that we cannot give up our reason, 
without giving up at the same time our individual per- 
sonality. For that must appear to each man to be his 15 
reason which produces in him the highest sense of cer- 
tainty; and yet it is not reason, except so far as it is 
of universal validity and obligatory on all mankind. 
There is a one heart for the whole mighty mass of 
humanity, and every pulse in each particular vessel 20 
strives to beat in concert with it. He who asserts that 
truth is of no importance except in the signification of 
sincerity, confounds sense with madness, and the word 
of God with a dream. If the power of reasoning be 
the gift of the supreme Reason, that we be sedulous, 25 
yea, and militant in the endeavor to reason aright, is 
his implied command. But what is of permanent and 
essential interest to one man must needs be so to all, 
in proportion to the means and opportunities of each. 
Woe to him by whom these are neglected, and double 30 
woe to him by whom they are withholden; for he robs 
at once himself and his neighbor. That man's soul 



TOLERATION, 119 

is not dear to himself, to whom the souls of his 
brethren are not dear. As far as they can be in- 
fluenced by him, they are parts and properties of his 
own soul, their faith his faith, their errors his burthen, 

5 their righteousness and bliss his righteousness and his 
reward — and of their guilt and misery his own will be 
the echo. As much as I love my fellow-men, so much 
and no more will I be intolerant of their heresies and 
unbelief — and I will honor and hold forth the right 

10 hand of fellowship to every individual who is equally 
intolerant of that which he conceives such in me. We 
will both exclaim — "I know not what antidotes among 
the complex views, impulses and circumstances, that 
form your moral being, God's gracious providence 

15 may have vouchsafed to you against the serpent fang 

of this error, — but it is a viper, and its poison deadly, 

although through higher influences some men may 

take the reptile to their bosom, and remain unstung. " 

In one of those poisonous journals, which deal out 

2oprofaneness, hate, fury, and sedition through the land, 
I read the following paragraph. **The Brahmin be- 
lieves that every man will be saved in his own persua- 
sion, and that all religions are equally pleasing to the 
God of all. The Christian confines salvation to the 

25 believer in his own Vedas and Shasters. Which is the 
more humane and philosophic creed of the two?" Let 
question answer question. Self-complacent scoffer! 
Whom meanest thou by God? The God of truth? — 
and can he be pleased with falsehood, and the de- 

30 basement or utter suspension of the reason which he 
gave to man, that he might receive from him the sac- 
rifice of truth? Or the God of love and mercy? — and 



I20 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 

can he be pleased with the blood of thousands poured 
out under the wheels of Juggernaut, or with the shrieks 
of children offered up as fire offerings to Baal or to 
Moloch? Or dost thou mean the God of holiness and 
infinite purity? — and can he be pleased with abomina- 5 
tions unutterable and more than brutal defilements — 
and equally pleased too as with that religion, which 
commands us that we have no fellowship with the un- 
fruitful works of darkness but to reprove them; — with 
that religion, which strikes the fear of the Most High 10 
so deeply, and the sense of the exceeding sinfulness 
of sin so inwardly, that the believer anxiously in- 
quires: Shall I give my first-born for my transgression^ 
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? — ^and which 
makes answer to him, — He hath showed thee^ O man^ 15 
what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee^ 
but to do justly^ and to love mercy ^ and to walk humbly 
with thy God 2^ But I check myself. It is at once 
folly and profanation of truth, to reason with the man 
who can place before his eyes a minister of the Gospel 20 
directing the eye of the widow from the corpse of her 
husband upward to his and her Redeemer — (the God 
of the living and not of the dead) — and then the 
remorseless Brahmin goading on the disconsolate 
victim to the flames of her husband's funeral pile, 25 
abandoned by, and abandoning, the helpless pledges 
of their love — and yet dare ask, which is the more 
humane and philosophic creed of the two? — No! No! 
when such opinions are in question I neither am, nor 
will be, nor wish to be regarded as, tolerant. — The 3^ 
Friend^ ii. 9 3. 

* Micah vi. 7, 8. 



FANCY AND IMAGINATION, 121 

14. FANCY AND IMAGINATION — GENIUS 
AND TALENT— THE TRANSCENDEN- 
TAL CONSCIOUSNESS — DEFINITION 
OF MYSTICISM — POWER OF AB- 
STRACT NOTIONS. 

You may conceive the difference in kind between 
the Fancy and the Imagination in this way, — that if 
the check of the senses and the reason were with- 
drawn, the first would become delirium, and the last 
5 mania. The Fancy brings together images which have 
no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together 
by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence; 
as in the well known passage in Hudibras: — 

*' The sun had long since in the lap 
10 Of Thetis taken out his nap, 

And like a lobster boil'd, the morn 
From black to red began to turn." 

The Imagination modifies images, and gives unity to 
variety; it sees all things in one, ilpih nelVuno. There 

15 is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in 
Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shakspeare is the 
absolute master. The first gives unity by throwing 
back into the distance; as after the magnificent ap- 
proach of the Messiah to battle, the poet, by one 

20 touch from himself — 

" far off their coming shone ! " — 

makes the whole one image. And so at the conclusion 

of the description of the appearance of the entranced 

angels, in which every sort of image, from all the 

25 regions of earth and air, is introduced to diversify and 



122 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, 

illustrate, — the reader is brought back to the single 
image by — 

" He call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep 
Of Hell resounded." 

The dramatic imagination does not throw back, but 5 
brings close; it stamps all nature with one, and that 
its own, meaning, as in Lear throughout.^ — Table Talk^ 
vi. 517- 

I have been in the habit of considering the qualities 
of intellect, the comparative eminence in which char- 10 
acterizes individuals and even countries, under four 
kinds — Genius, Talent, Sense, and Cleverness. The 
first I use in the sense of most general acceptance, as 
the faculty which adds to the existing stock of power 
and knowledge by new views, new combinations; by 15 
discoveries not accidental but anticipated, or resulting 
from anticipation. In short, I define Genius, as orgi- 
nality in intellectual construction; the moral accom- 
paniment, and actuating principle of which consists, 
perhaps, in the carrying on the freshness and feelings 20 
of childhood into the powers of manhood. 

By Talent, on the other hand, I mean the compara- 
tive faculty of acquiring, arranging, and applying the 
stock furnished by others, and already existing in 
books or other conservatories of intellect. 25 

By Sense I understand that just balance of the 
faculties which is to the judgment what health is to 
the body. The mind seems to act at once and alto- 
gether by a synthetic rather than an analytic process; 
even as the outward senses, from which the metaphor 30 
is taken, perceive immediately, each as it were by a 



GENIUS AND TALENT. I23 

peculiar tact or intuition, without any consciousness 
of the mechanism by which the perception is realized. 
This is often exemplified in well-bred, unaffected, and 
innocent women. I know a lady, on whose judgment, 

5 from constant experience of its rectitude, I could 
rely almost as on an oracle. But when she has some- 
times proceeded to a detail of the grounds and reasons 
for her opinion, then, led by similar experience, I 
have been tempted to interrupt her with — *'I will take 

10 your advice,'* or, *'I shall act on your opinion; for I 
am sure you are in the right. But as to the fors and 
becauses^ leave them to me to find out." The general 
accompaniment of sense is a disposition to avoid ex- 
tremes, whether in theory or in practice, with a desire 

15 to remain in sympathy with the general mind of the 
age or country, and a feeling of the necessity and 
utility of compromise. If genius be the initiative, and 
talent the administrative, sense is the conservative, 
branch in the intellectual republic. 

20 By Cleverness (which I dare not with Dr. Johnson 
call a low word, while there is a sense to be expressed 
which it alone expresses) I mean a comparative readi- 
ness in the invention and use of means, for the realiz- 
ing of objects and ideas — often of such ideas, which 

25 the man of genius only could have originated, and 
which the clever man perhaps neither fully compre- 
hends nor adequately appreciates, even at the moment 
that he is prompting or executing the machinery of their 
accomplishment. In short, cleverness is a sort of genius 

30 for instrumentality. It is the brain in the hand. In 
literature, cleverness is more frequently accompanied 
by wit, genius and sense by humor. — The Friend^ ii. 384. 



124 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, 

The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale 
of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its 
inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born 
and departs. From theiii the stars rise, and touching 
them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the 5 
natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imper- 
fectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden 
by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which 
few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the 
multitude below, these vapors appear, now as the dark 10 
haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude 
with impunity; and now, all aglow with colors not 
their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of 
happiness and power. But in all ages there have been 
a few, who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the 15 
vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls, have 
learned that the sources must be far higher and far 
inward; a few, who even in the level streams have 
detected elements, which neither the vale itself nor the 
surrounding mountains contained or could supply, 20 
How and whence to these thoughts, these strong 
probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive 
knowledge may finally supervene, can be learnt only 
by the fact. I might oppose to the question the words 
with which Plotinus supposes Nature to answer a simi- 25 
lar difficulty. "Should anyone interrogate her, how 
she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and 
speak, she will reply: It behooves thee not to disquiet 
me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, 
even as I am silent, and work without words.'* 30 

Likewise in the fifth book of the fifth Ennead, 
speaking of the highest and intuitive knowledge as 



THE TRANSCENDENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 125 

distinguished from the discursive, or in the language 
of Wordsworth, 

** The vision and the faculty divine " ; 

he says : **It is not lawful to inquire from whence it 

5 sprang, as if it were a thing subject to place and motion, 
for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from 
hence to some other place; but it either appears to us 
or it does not appear. So that we ought not to pur- 
sue it with a view of detecting its secret source, but to 

10 watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; prepar- 
ing ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits 
patiently for the rising sun." They, and they only, 
can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred 
power of self-intuition, who within themselves can 

15 interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings 
of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the 
caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits 
the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the 
horned fly to leave room in its tnvolua^um for antennce 

20 yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential 
works in them, even as the actual works on them. In 
short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corre- 
sponding world of sense; and we have it. All the 
organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world 

25 of spirit, though the latter organs are not developed 
in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first ap- 
pearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else 
could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, 
will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested 

30 goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and re- 
spect? **Poor man! he is not made for this world." 



126 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 

Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfill- 
ment; for man must either rise or sink — Biographia 
Liter aria ^ iii. 325. 



Antinous. — ''What do you call Mysticism? And do 
you use the word in a good or in a bad sense?'* 5 

Notes, — *'In the latter only; as far, at least, as we 
are now concerned with it. When a man refers to in- 
ward feelings and experiences, of which mankind at 
large are not conscious, as evidences of the truth of 
any opinion — such a man I call a Mystic : and the 10 
grounding of any theory or belief on accidents and 
anomalies of individual sensations or fancies and the 
use of peculiar terms invented, or perverted from their 
ordinary significations, for the purpose of expressing 
these idiosyncracies and pretended facts of interior 15 
consciousness, I name Mysticism. Where the error 
consists simply in the Mystic's attaching to these 
anomalies of his individual temperament the character 
of reality, and in receiving them as permanent truths, 
liaving a subsistence in the Divine Mind, though re- 20 
vealed to himself alone; but entertains this persuasion 
without demanding or expecting the same faith in his 
neighbors — I should regard it as a species of enthu- 
siasm, always indeed to be deprecated, but yet capable 
of co-existing with many excellent qualities both of 25 
head and heart. But when the Mystic, by ambition 
or still meaner passions, or (as sometimes is the case) 
by an uneasy and self-doubting state of mind which 
seeks confirmation in outward sympathy, is led to im- 
pose his faith, as a duty, on mankind generally: and 30 



DEFINITION OF M YS TICISM. 1 2 7 

when, with such views, he asserts that the same experi- 
ences would be vouchsafed, the same truths revealed, 
to every man but for his secret wickedness and unholy 
will; — such a Mystic is a fanatic, and in certain states 

5 of the public mind, a dangerous member of society. 
And most so in those ages and countries in which fanat- 
ics of elder standing are allowed to persecute the fresh 
competitor. For under these predicaments. Mysti- 
cism, though originating in the singularities of an indi- 

10 vidual nature, and therefore essentially anomalous, is 
nevertheless highly contagious. It is apt to collect a 
swarm and cluster circuni fana^ around the new fane; 
and therefore merits the name oi fanaticism^ or as the 
Germans say, Schwdrmerei that is, swarm-making.** 

15 We will return to the harmless species, the enthusi- 
astic Mystics; — a species that may again be subdivided 
into two ranks. And it will not be other than germane 
to the subject, if I endeavor to describe them in a sort 
of allegory or parable. Let us imagine a poor pilgrim 

20 benighted in a wilderness or desert, and pursuing his 
way in the starless dark with a lantern in his hand. 
Chance or his happy genius leads him to an oasis or 
natural garden, such as in the creations of my youthful 
fancy I supposed Enos, the child of Cain, to have 

25 found. And here, hungry and thirsty, the way-wearied 
man rests at a fountain; and the taper of his lantern 
throws its light on an overshadowing tree, a boss of 
snow-white blossoms, through which the green and 
growing fruits peeped, and the ripe golden fruitage 

30 glowed. Deep, vivid, and faithful are the impressions, 
which the lovely imagery comprised within the scanty 
circle of light makes and leaves on his memory. But 



128 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, 

scarcely has he eaten of the fruits and drunk of the 
fountain, ere scared by the roar and howl from the 
desert he hurries forward: and as he passes with hasty 
steps through grove and glade, shadows and imperfect 
beholdings and vivid fragments of things distinctly seen 5 
blend with the past and present shapings of his brain. 
Fancy modifies sight. His dreams transfer their 
forms to real objects; and these lend a substance and 
an outness to his dreams. Apparitions greet him; and 
when at a distance from this enchanted land, and on 10 
a different track, the dawn of day discloses to him a 
caravan, a troop of his fellow-men, his memory, which 
is itself half fancy, is interpolated afresh by every 
attempt to recall, connect, and piece out his recol- 
lections. His narration is received as a madman's tales 15 
He shrinks from the rude laugh and contemptuous 
sneer, and retires into himself. Yet the craving for 
sympathy, strong in proportion to the intensity of his 
convictions, impels him to unbosom himself to abstract 
auditors; and the poor quietist becomes a penman, 20 
and, all too poorly stocked for the writer's trade, he 
borrows his phrases and figures from the only writings 
to which he has had access, the sacred books of his 
religion. And thus I shadow out the enthusiastic 
Mystic of the first sort; at the head of which stands 25 
the illuminated Teutonic theosopher and shoemaker, 
honest Jacob Bohme, born near Gorlitz, in Upper 
Lusatia, in the 17th of our Elizabeth's reign, and 
who died in the 2 2d of her successor's. 

To delineate a Mystic of the second and higher 30 
order, we need only endow our pilgrim with equal gifts 
of nature, but these developed and displayed by all 



DEFINITION OF MYSTICISM 129 

the aids and arts of education and favorable fortune. 
He is on his way to the Mecca of his ancestral and 
national faith, with a well-guarded and numerous pro- 
cession of merchants and fellow-pilgrims, on the estab- 

5 lished track. At the close of day the caravan has 
halted: the full moon rises on the desert: and he 
strays forth alone, out of sight but to no unsafe dis- 
tance; and chance leads him, too, to the same oasis 
or islet of verdure on the sea of sand. He wanders at 

10 leisure in its maze of beauty and sweetness, and thrids 
his way through the odorous and flowering thickets 
into open spots of greenery, and discovers statues and 
memorial characters, grottos and refreshing caves. 
But the moonshine, the imaginative poesy of Nature, 

15 spreads its soft shadowy charm over all, conceals dis- 
tances, and magnifies heights and modifies relations, 
and fills up vacuities with its own whiteness, counter- 
feiting substance ; and where the dense shadows lie, 
makes solidity imitate hollowness, and gives to all 

20 objects a tender visionary hue and softening. Inter- 
pret the moonlight and the shadows as the peculiar 
genius and sensibility of the individual's own spirit; 
and here you have the other sort; a Mystic, an enthu- 
siast of a nobler breed — a Fenelon. But the residen- 

25 tiary, or the frequent visitor of the favored spot, who 
has scanned its beauties by steady daylight, and mas- 
tered its true proportions and lineaments,— he will 
discover that both pilgrims have indeed been there. 
He will know, that the delightful dream, which the 

30 latter tells, is a dream of truth; and that even in the 
bewildered tale of the former there is truth mingled 
with the dream. — Aids to Reflection^ i. 353. 



130 PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 

It seems a paradox only to the unthinking, and it is 
a fact that none, but the unread in history, will deny, 
that in periods of popular tumult and innovation the 
more abstract a notion is, the more readily has it been 
found to combine, the closer has appeared its affinity, 5 
with the feelings of a people and with all their imme- 
diate impulses to action. At the commencement of 
the French Revolution, in the remotest villages every 
tongue was employed in echoing and enforcing the 
almost geometrical abstractions of the physiocratic 10 
politicians and economists. The public roads were 
crowded with armed enthusiasts disputing on the ina- 
lienable sovereignty of the people, the imprescriptible 
laws of the pure reason, and the universal constitution, 
which, as rising out of the nature and rights of man as 15 
man, all nations alike were under the obligation of 
adopting. Turn over the fugitive writings, that are 
still extant, of the age of Luther; peruse the pam- 
phlets and loose sheets that came out in flights during 
the reign of Charles I. and the Republic; and you 20 
will find in these one continued comment on the 
aphorism of Lord Bacon (a man assuredly sufficiently 
acquainted with the extent of secret and personal in- 
fluence), that the knowledge of the speculative prin- 
ciples of men in general between the age of twenty 25 
and thirty, is the one great source of political proph- 
ecy. And Sir Philip Sidney regarded the adoption 
of one set of principles in the Netherlands, as a proof 
of the divine agency, and the fountain of all the events 
and successes of that Revolution. — Aids to Refle^.tion^ 30 
i. 28. 



Hpborisms, Sentences, anb Sbort Sai^fngs* 

I HAVE never known a trader in philanthropy, who 
was not wrong in heart somewhere or other. Individ- 
uals so distinguished are usually unhappy in their 
family relations, — men not benevolent or beneficent 

5 to individuals, but almost hostile to them, yet lavish- 
ing money, and labor, and time, on the race, the 
abstract notion. The cosmopolitism which does not 
spring out of, and blossom upon, the deep-rooted stem 
of nationality or patriotism, is a spurious and rotten 

10 growth. — Table Talk^ vi. 474. 



In wonder all philosophy began ; in wonder it ends; 
and admiration fills up the interspace. But the first 
wonder is the off -spring of ignorance: the last is the 
parent of adoration. The first is the birth-throe of 
15 our knowledge ; the last is its euthanasy and apotheosis, 
— Aids to Reflection^ i. 254. 



To carry on the feelings of childhood into the 
powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of 
wonder and novelty with the appearances which every 
20 day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar, 

With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, 
And man and woman 

this is the character and privilege of genius, and one 



132 APHORISMS, SENTENCES, SHORT SAYINGS. 

of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. 
And so to represent familiar objects as to awaken the 
minds of others to a like freshness of sensation concern- 
ing them — that constant accompaniment of mental, no 
less than of bodily, health — to the same modest ques- 5 
tioning of a self-discovered and intelligent ignorance, 
which, like the deep and massy foundations of a 
Roman bridge, forms half of the whole structure — 
(prudens interrogatio dimidium sctenticE, says Lord 
Bacon) — this is the prime merit of genius, and its 10 
most unequivocal mode of manifestation. — The 
Friend^ ii. 104. 

In times of old, books were as religious oracles; as 
literature advanced, they next became venerable pre- 
ceptors; they then descended to the rank of instruct- 15 
ive friends; and, as their number increased, they sank 
still lower to that of entertaining companions; and at 
present they seem degraded into culprits to hold up 
their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the 
less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write from 20 
humor or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to 
abide the decision **of him that reads in malice, or him 
that reads after dinner." — Biographia Literaria^ iii. 

183. 

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume 25 
yourself ignorant of his understanding. — Biographia 
Liter aria., iii. 183. 

The Earth, with its scarred face, is the symbol of 
the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity. — Table 
Talk., vi. 277. 30 



APHORISMS, SENTENCES, SHORT SAYINGS, 133 

The people of all other nations but the Jewish seem 
to look backward, and also to exist for the present; 
but in the Jewish scheme everything is prospective 
and preparatory ; nothing, however trifling, is done for 
itself alone, but all is typical of something yet to come. 
— Table Talk^ vi. 280. 



I wish our clever young poets would remember my 
homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, proses 
words in their best order; — poetry=:the best words in 
10 the best order. — Table Talk^ vi. 293. 



Swift was anima Rabelaisii habiians in sicca, — the soul 
of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. — Table Talk, vi. 
334. 



Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. 

15 1 do not think it possible that anyone born an Aristo- 
telian can become a Platonist ; and I am sure no born 
Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They 
are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to 
impossible to conceive a third. The one considers 

20 reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a 
power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to 
understand what Plato meant by an idea. There is a 
passage, indeed, in the Eudemian Ethics which looks 
like an exception; but I doubt not of its being spuri- 

25 ous, as that whole work is supposed by some to be. 
With Plato ideas are constitutive in themselves. 

Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the 
understanding, the faculty judging by the senses. 



134 APHORISMS, SENTENCES, SHORT SAYINGS. 

He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself 
^ into that higher state which was natural to Plato, and 
has been so to others, in which the understanding is 
distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down 
upon from the throne of actual ideas, or living, in- 
born, essential truths. — Table Talk, vi. 336. 



Thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child's 
mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have 
come to years of discretion and be able to choose for 
itself. I showed him my garden, and told him it was 10 
my botanical garden. "How so?" said he; "it is 
covered with weeds." '*0h," I replied, *V>^^/isonly 
because it has not come to its age of discretion and 
choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty 
to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice 15 
the soil toward roses and strawberries." — Table Talk, 
vi. 339. 

Much as the Romans owed to Greece in the begin- 
ning, while their mind was, as it were, tuning itself 
to an after-effort of its own music; it suffered more in 20 
proportion by the influence of Greek literature sub- 
sequently, when it was already mature, and ought to 
have worked for itself. It then became a superfeta- 
tion upon, and not an ingredient in, the national char- 
acter. With the exception of the stern pragmatic his- 25 
torian and the moral satirist, it left nothing original to 
the Latin Muse. — Table Talk, vi. 397. 



It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have 
retained or assumed the two beautifully discriminated 



APHORISMS, SENTENCES, SHORT SAVINGS. 13S 

sounds of the soft and hard theta; as in, i^Ay thoughts — 
the thin ether that^ etc. How particularly fine the hard 
theta is in an English termination, as in that grand 
word — Death — for which the Germans gutturize a 
5 sound that puts you in mind of nothing but a loath- 
some toad. — Table Talk^y'i, 399. 



Could you ever discover anything sublime, in our 
sense of the term, in the classic Greek literature? I 
never couldo Sublimity is Hebrew by birth. — Table 
10 Talk^ vio 406. 

The free class in a slave state is always, in one 

sense, the most patriotic class of people in an empire; 

for their patriotism is not simply the patriotism of other 

people, but an aggregate of lust of power, and distinc- 

iStion, and supremacy^ — Table Talk, vi. 441. 



The Romans would never have subdued the Italian 
tribes if they had not boldly left Italy and conquered 
foreign nations; and so, at last, crushed their next-door 
neighbors by external pressure. — Table Talk, vi. 445. 



20 The principle of the Gothic architecture is Infinity 
made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of 
genius than the Greek style; but then it depends 
much more on execution for its effect. — Table Talk, vi. 
461. 

25 Imitation is the mesothesis of Likeness and Differ- 
ence. The difference is as essential to it as the like- 



136 APHORISMS, SENTENCES, SHORT SAYINGS. 

ness ; for without the difference, it would be a Copy 
or Fac-simile. But, to borrow a term from astronomy, 
it is a librating mesothesis: for it may verge more to 
likeness, as in painting, or more to difference, as in 
sculpture. — Table Talk, vi. 468. 



NOTES. 



3 : 6. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boetius, or Boethius, was a 
Roman poet and philosopher, born about 470-75, A. d. He was 
executed by order of Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths ; and 
while imprisoned in the baptistry of the church at Ticinum (Pavia), 
wrote his famous work, Di Consolatione Philosophies. This was 
a dialogue, in alternate verse and prose, between the author and 
Philosophy. It was a favorite manual of morality during the 
Middle Ages, and was translated into English by King Alfred. 
Boethius is usually regarded as the last ' ' classical " Latin writer. 

3 : 8. Caius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius was a Gallo-Roman 
author of verse and prose, born, probably, at Lyons about 431 
A. D. ; died about 482. His prose writings consist of 147 letters 
in very barbarous Latin. His poems, which include panegyrics 
to several successive Roman emperors, are said to be superior, in 
their latinity, to his epistles, but characterized by over-subtlety of 
thought and an obscure and figurative style. 

4:31. The Rev. Wm. Lisle Bowles was an English clergyman 
and poet. He wrote much on antiquarian and ecclesiastical sub- 
jects, but his most memorable publications were a volume of 
Sonnets (1789), which had great influence on Coleridge (see 
Biographia Liter aria ^ iii. 149-63) ; and his edition of Pope (1806), 
which led to a celebrated controversy with Byron and Campbell. 
His sister Caroline was Southey's second wife. 

5:1. Robert Sou they was Poet Laureate from 1813 to 1843. 

5 : 21. Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) was the author of many poems, 
historical, contemplative, and dramatic]; the longest of which was 
his Civil Wars of York and Lancaster ; and the best, his Epistle 
to the Countess of Cumberland, a favorite with Wordsworth, He 

137 



13S NOTES. 

was called by his contemporaries " well-languaged Daniel." 
** Writing two hundred and fifty years ago," says Lowell, ^'he 
stands in no need of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen 
words, and not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have be- 
come obsolete." ** No writer of the period," says Saintsbury, 
** has such a command of pure English " {History of Elizabethan 
Literature). 

7 : 3. The lines upon which this charge rests are chiefly the 
following : 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ; 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And Cometh from afar : 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God, who is our home. 

(Stanza v.) 

Hence in a season of calm weather, 
Though inland far we be. 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither. 

(Stanza ix.) 

In his note on the *' Ode" (Centenary Edition, v. 103), Words- 
worth protested against the conclusion that he meant to inculcate 
belief in a prior state of existence. '* It is far too shadowy a 
notion to be recommended to faith, as more than an element in 
our instincts of immortality. But let us bear in mind that, though 
the idea is not advanced in revelation, there is nothing there to 
contradict it, and the fall of man presents an analogy in its favor. 
Accordingly a pre-existent state has entered into the popular 
creeds of many nations ; and, among all persons acquainted with 
classic literature, is known as an ingredient in Platonic philos- 
ophy. . . I took hold of the notion of pre-existence as having 
sufficient foundation in humanity for authorizing me to make for 
my purpose the best use of it I could as a poet." For the Platonic 
doctrine of reminiscence see especially Meno^ Jowett's transla- 
tion, i. 269 (ist ed.), Phcedrus, i. 584, and Phccdo, i. 418-24. 

10 ; 9, The dramatic unities, or so-called " rules of A-dstotle," 



SELECTIONS FROM COLERIDGE. 139 

as expounded by the French classical critics, were : ist, the unity 
of place, which required that the scene should remain the same 
throughout the play ; 2d, the unity of time, which limited the 
duration of the events represented to twenty-four hours ; or — as 
more strictly applied — to the time that it took to act them ; and 
3d, the unity of action, which meant, practically, that there should 
be one plot and one set of characters. 

12 : 6. Claude Gele'e, commonly called Claude Lorraine, from 
his birthplace ; a French landscape painter, born in 1600, died 
about 1680. 

13 : I. Sir George Rowland Beaumont ; was a patron of 
artists, a collector, and an amateur, painter. He was an intimate 
friend of Wordsworth, who wrote a number of Inscriptions for 
his grounds at Coleorton. See also Wordsworth's Epistle to Sir 
Geo. Rowland^ Bart. ; Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of 
Peele Castle in a Storm, etc., etc. 

13: 28. ** It is false that any representation is mistaken for 
reality ; that any dramatic fable in its materiality was ever cred- 
ible, or, for a single moment was ever credited. . . The truth 
is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from 
the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that 
the players are only players. . . The delight of tragedy pro- 
ceeds from our consciousness of fiction ; if we thought murders 
and treasons real, they would please no more.'' — Preface to 
Shakspeare. 

17 : 26. Ferrauwith pleasure heard the Christian Knight, 
Then both agreed to adjourn the bloody fight ; 
And now, so firmly were they bound to peace, 
So far did rage and rival hatred cease, 
That, in no wise, the Pagan prince would view 
Brave Amon's son on foot his way pursue, 
But courteous bade him mount his steed behind, 
Then took the track Angelica to find. 
O noble minds, by knights of old possessed ! 
Two faiths they knew, one love their hearts professed ; 
And still their limbs the smarting anguish feel 
Of strokes inflicted by the hostile steel. 
Through winding paths and lonely woods they go, 
Yet no suspicion their brave bosoms know. 

— Hoole's translation. 



I40 NOTES. 

19 : 1. Schiller's tragedy Die Rduber was published in 1781, 
and presented in the same year at the Mannheim Theater. 
*' Schiller commenced it," says Carlyle, " in his nineteenth year ; 
and the circumstances under which it was composed are to be 
traced in all its parts. . . A rude simplicity, combined with a 
gloomy and overpowering force, are its chief characteristics. . . 
Everything indicates the condition of a keen and powerful intel- 
lect, which had studied men in books only. . . The perusal of 
the Robbers produces an effect powerful even to pain ; we are 
absolutely wounded by the catastrophe ; our minds are darkened 
and distressed, as if we had witnessed the execution of a criminal. 
It is in vain that we rebel against the inconsistencies and cru- 
dities of the work ; its faults are redeemed by the living energy 
that pervades it.'' Life of Schiller, Part I. See Coleridge's son- 
net, To the Author of the Robbers, Harper's ed., vii. 63. 

19:9. This historical tragedy, published in 1799, is ^^ three 
parts : WallensteitCs Camp, The Piccolomini, and WallensteitC s 
Death. Coleridge translated only the last two parts. See his 
Preface to the Translation, Harper's ed.,vii. 481. 

19:24, Published in 1803. *' The Braut von Messina wsls 
an experiment ; an attempt to exhibit a modern subject and mod- 
ern sentiments in an antique garb. . . The experiment was not 
successful. . . For its specimens of lyrical poetry, tender, affect- 
ing, sometimes exquisitely beautiful, the Bride of Messina will 
long deserve a careful perusal ; but as exemplifying a new form of 
the drama it has found no imitators, and is likely to find none." 
Carlyle, Life of Schiller, Part III. 

21 : 19. Lucina, in Fletcher's tragedy Valentinian, is a 
Roman matron who is betrayed to the Emperor, and emulating 
Lucretia, puts herself to death. 

22:18. Aecius, in the same play, is a Roman general, so 
extravagantly loyal to the imperial person that, although a man 
of stainless honor and a true friend to Maximus, the husband 
of the wronged Lucina, he threatens Maximus with death if he 
attempts to avenge his disgrace upon Valentinian. 

22 : 30. A debauched ruffian and murderer in Measure for 
Measure. 

24:14. -'A vainglorious knight, wholly consecrated to 



SELECTIONS FROM COLERIDGE, 141 

singularity/' in Jonson's comedy, Every Man out of his 
Humor. 

24 : 14. A swaggering coward and braggadocio in Every Man 
in his Humor. 

25 : 17. A character in Jonson's comedy, Epicene^ or the Silent 
Woman, who has an exaggerated horror of noise. Upon this 

single " humor '' or eccentricity, the whole action of the play is 
made to hinge. 

25 : 25. A red-nosed and bibulous follower of Sir John Fal- 
staff. " Oh, thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bon- 
fire-light ! Thou hast saved me a thousand marks in links and 
torches, walking with thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern ; 
but the sack that thou hast drunk me would have brought me 
lights as good cheap, at the dearest chandler's in Europe," 
Henry IV. Part I. Act III. scene 3. 

26 : 5. Samuel Richardson, the first modern English novelist, 
author of Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe^ and Sir Charles Grandison. 

26 : 10. George Chapman, a voluminous dramatic author, 
and the continuator of Marlowe's poem. Hero and Leander^ issued 
his version of the Iliad in 1598-1611 ; and. of the Odyssey vci 
1614-15. 

33 : 2. Be thou blest, Bertram, and succeed thy father 
In manners, as in shape. Thy blood and virtue 
Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness 
Share with thy birthright. Love all, trust a few. 
Do wrong to none : be able for thine enemy 
Rather in power than use ; and keep thy friend 
Under thy own life's key ; be checked for silence, 
But never taxed for speech. 

--AlVs Well that Ends Well,, \. 1. 

33: 18. See Hamdet, I. 3. 

34 : 2. The foolish captain of the watch in Much Ado about 
Nothing. 

34:8. August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (1761- 
18 19) was a popular and prolific German playwright. His melo- 
drama, The Stranger (an adaptation of Menschenhass und Reue), 
still keeps the stage in England and America. 

36 : 7. Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura Trapassi, 
whose surname was changed to Metastasio^ wg§ an Italian poet 



142 NOTES. 

(1698-1782), author of many operas and lyrical dramas, largely 
classical in subject, which were set to music by Sardi, Mozart, and 
other famous composers. 

38 : 2. Shakspeare (whom you and every playhouse bill, 
Style the divine, the matchless— what you will—) 
For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, 
And grew immortal in his own despite. 

— Pope, Epistle to Augustus. 

40 : 29. Zoilus, a grammarian and critic of uncertain date, 
but probably about 270 B. c, became famous for his captious 
assaults upon Homer. 

42:31. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, in his Discours sur 
VOfigine de V Inegaliie parnii les Hommes (1753), maintained that 
private property was a crime, and that civilization had corrupted 
rather than improved the morals of mankind. 

53: 5. This five-act tragedy was composed originally in 1797, 
under the title of Osorio. It was offered in vain to Drury Lane 
and Covent Garden theaters. Sheridan, who was proprietor of 
the former, said, ''Coleridge sent me a play, and in one scene 
(a cavern) the water was said to drip, drip, drip — in fact it was 
all dripping." In 18 13 Bryon induced the managers of Drury 
Eane to accept it, and it was recast for the stage under a new 
title. See Biographical Sketch, p. xxix. 

58 : 10. The Spanish play of this name, by Gabriel Tellez, 
was founded on traditions concerning a certain Don Juan Tenorio 
of Seville, supposed to have lived in the fourteenth century. 
Moliere and Corneille, in France ; Goldoni, in Italy ; Gliick and 
Mozart, in Germany, and Byron in England have made Don 
Juan the subject of dramas, operas, and poems. 

59 : 25. Jean Baptiste Carrier, a member of the French Con- 
vention, infamous for his cruelties, who was guillotined at Paris 
in 1794. He was sent to Nantes in 1793 to suppress the re- 
bellion in La Vendee. Under his orders hundreds of prisoners, 
including women and children, were drowned in the Loire. 
Barges were towed out into the stream, with the victims under 
hatches, and scuttled and sunk. These were the famous NoyadeSy 
or Drowniftgs, which Carrier reported to the Convention as the 
*' translation of culprits." " Sentence of deportation," he wrote, 



SELECTIONS FROM COLERIDGE, 143 

"was executed vertically''' "By degrees," says Carlyle, "day- 
light itself witnesses Noyades : women and men are tied together, 
feet and feet, hands and hands ; and flung in ; this they call 
Mdriage Republicain, See Carlyle, French Revolution, Book V. 
chap, iii., and Swinburne's poem Les Noyades, 

6l : 10. Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727-85), an Italian 
painter and engraver, who took up his residence in London in 
1755, and was one of the first members of the Royal Academy. 
His subjects were historical, and his painting is said to be feeble, 
although graceful and correct. He excelled as a draughtsman 
and engraver. 

66:1. John Hacket (i 592-1670) was made Bishop of Lich- 
field and Coventry in 1661, and restored Lichfield Cathedral, 
injured in the Civil Wars. His Century of Sermons was pub- 
lished with a memoir of the author in 1675. His SciHnia Rese- 
rata^ a life of his patron Archbishop Williams, was printed in 
1693. " What a delightful and instructive book Bishop Hacket's 
Life of Archbishop Williams is ! You learn more from it of that 
which is valuable toward an insight into the times preceding the 
Civil War, than from all the ponderous histories and memoirs 
now composed about that period " {Table Talky vi. 459). 

69 : 30. Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, burned at the 
stake at Oxford, 1555, with the other Protestant martyrs, Cran- 
mer and Ridley. His sermons, which have been many times 
reprinted, are marked by sincerity of feeling, and a homely, popu- 
lar style. See The Ploughers, and Seven Sermons^ in Arber's 
English reprints. 

70 : 17. Sir Francis Walsingham, Ambassador to France and 
Minister of Foreign Affairs under Queen Elizabeth. His state 
papers were published in 1655, under the title of The Complete 
Ambassador, Many of his letters and dispatches are quoted in 
Froude's History of England, 

73:4. Isaac Barrow (1630-77), a mathematician and theo- 
logian, professor of Greek and Mathematics at Cambridge and 
Vice Chancellor of the university. His English writings consist 
mainly of sermons. 

73 • ^' Sir Roger L'Estrange, a royalist pamphleteer, who took 
an active part in the Civil War, and was appointed censor of the 



144 NOTES. 

press after the Restoration. His writings are coarse and violent 
in style. 

73 •6. Jeremy Collier, a non-juring bishop (1650-1 726) best 
known for his Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of 
the English Stage. He also wrote a church history and several 
volumes of moral essays. 

73 ; 13. Roger North's life of his brother Francis, Lord Guil- 
ford, Keeper of the Great Seal, was published, together with the 
lives of his other brothers, Dudley and John, in 1740-42. 
Macaulay calls him *' a most intolerant Tory, a most affected and 
pedantic writer." 

73 • 29. Coleridge has reference here, of course, only to 
Cowley's pleasant prose essays, not to his frigid and artificial 
verse. 

74 : 4. Author of Discourses concerning Government, a re- 
publican statesman of the time of the Civil War, executed in 
1682 for alleged complicity in the Rye House plot. 

84 : 9. Samuel Whitbread (1758-1815) was a prominent Whig 
statesman and a leader of his party in the House of Commons. 

84 : 17. William Whitehead was appointed Poet Laureate on the 
death of Colley Cibber in 1758. A Charge to the Poets^SiS printed 
in 174 1, so that he could hardly have been '* exerting the preroga- 
tive of his laureateship " in writing it. 

87:3. Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), author of The 
Botanic Garden, was a practicing physician at Lichfield. 

87 : 3. William Roscoe, the historian, author of the Life of 
Lorenzo de^ Medici, etc. , was an active member of the Liverpool 
bar and of the House of Commons. He died in 1831. 

89 : 16. A ridiculous parson in Fielding's y^i-^/// Andrews. 

93 : 10. Johann Gottfried von Herder, one of the most versa- 
tile and influential of German writers, was court preacher and 
member of the consistory at Weimar (i 776-1 803). De Quincey 
calls him the German Coleridge. 

96: 25. The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide 
Amang the bearded bear, 
I turned the weeder-clips aside. 
And spared the symbol dear. 

— Burns' Answer to Verses Addressed to the Poet 
by the Goodivi/e of Wauchope House. 



SELECTIONS FROM COLERIDGE. 145 

98 : II. Johann Philipp Palm, a German publisher, of Nurem- 
berg, for sending through the mails a pamphlet against Bona- 
parte entitled Deutschland in seiner tie fen Erniedrigung^ was 
tried by a French military commission and shot at Braunau (1806), 
where a life-sized bronze statue was erected to his memory in 
1866. 

100 : 10. The butterfly, emblem of the immortal soul {^vxh) 
See the beautiful myth of Cupid and Psyche in the Golden Ass of 
Apuleius. 

101 : 23. Samuel Daniel, Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland. 
103 • 15- Johann Christian von Wolf (i 679-1 754), the German 

philosopher and mathematician. 

104 : 12. At the castle of the Wartburg, near Eisenach, in 
Thuringia, Luther was in hiding in 1521-22, for some ten months, 
following his appearance at the Diet of Worms. He busied him- 
self in this retreat with his translation of the New Testament. 

104 : 26. The Latin version of the Scriptures made by Jerome 
in the fourth century and accepted by the Roman Catholic Church 
as the only authentic text. 

105 : 18. The Septuagint is a Greek version of the Bible sup- 
posed to have been made by seventy translators at Alexandria in 
the time of the Ptolemies. 

108 : 4. Jean Jacques Rousseau. 

111:7. ** All things are artificial, for Nature is the art of God.'' 
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici. 

113:20. Domenico Cimarosa (1754-1801), an Italian musical 
composer. Coleridge alludes to his opera Gli Orazi {The 
Horatii). 

116 : 16. See p. 7*3 note, 

116:20. George Berkeley, Dean of Derry and Bishop of 
Cloyne, maintained in his Treatise concerning the Principles of 
Human Knowledge (1710) and Dialogues between Hylas and 
Philonous (17 13) that matter has no existence independent of 
mind. 

121 : 8. The famous burlesque romance, satirizing the Puritans, 
published in 1663-64 by Samuel Butler. 

124:25. A Neo- Platonic philosopher of the third century. 
His works exist in fifty-four books, called Enneads. The passage 



146 NOTES. 

cited is from Ennead III. viii. 3, p. 634, Creuzer's ed., Oxford, 
1835. According to Charles Lamb, Plotinus seems to have been 
among Coleridge's schoolboy studies at Christ's Hospital. See 
Introduction, p. vii. 

134 ; 7. John Thelwall, an English author of liberal opinions, 
who was once prosecuted for high treason, in company with 
Home Tooke, the author of the Diversions of Purley. Coleridge, 
in his radical days, had known Thelwall in the South of England 
''among the Quantocks." They died in the same year, 1834. 



jEuQlisb IReaMngs tor Stu&ents. 

This collection is planned to supply English master- 
pieces in editions at once competently edited and inex- 
pensive. The aim will be to fill vacancies now existing 
because of subject, treatment, or price. The volumes 
will be of convenient size and serviceably bound. 

Coleridge : Prose Extracts. 

Selections chosen and edited with introduction and notes by Henry 
A. Beers, Professor in Yale College, xxix + 148 pp. i6mo. 
Boards. Teachers' price, 30 cents ; postage 4 cents additional. 

The selections, varying in length from a paragraph to 
ten or twenty pages, will be mainly from Table Talk and 
Biographia Literaria^ but also in part from The Friend^ 
Notes on Shakspeare^ and other writings. They have 
been chosen, so far as may be, to illustrate the range and 
variety of Coleridge's thought, and, to emphasize this 
purpose, have been grouped by subjects. The introduc- 
tion briefly summarizes the author's intellectual position 
and influence. 

De Quincey : Joan of Arc and The English Mail 
Coach. 

Edited with an introduction and notes by James Morgan Hart, 
Professor in Cornell University, xxvi + 138 pp. i6mo. Boards. 
Teachers' price, 30 cents ; postage 4 cents additional. 

These essays have been chosen as fairly representative 
of the two most notable phases of the author's work, and 
as at the same time attractive to the novice in literary 
study. The introduction sketches the leading facts of 
De Quincey's life, and indicates some of the prominent 



English "fadings for Students. 



features of his style. Allusions and other points of un- 
usual difficulty are explained in the notes. This volume 
and the one containing the Essays on BoswelVs Johnson 
(see below) are used at Cornell University as foundation 
for elementary rhetorical study. 

Dryden : Select Plays. 

Edited with a brief introduction and notes by James W. Bright, 
Assistant Professor in the Johns Hopkins University. About loo 
pp. i2mo. \^In p7'-epa7'ation.'\ 

Aside from their representing the principal literary ac- 
tivity, in point of quantity, of one of the foremost English 
writers, Dryden's plays have a peculiar interest in having 
been among the first to be played upon the reopening of 
the theatres under Charles II. 

Goldsmith : Present State of Polite Learning. 

Edited with introduction and notes by J. M. Hart, Professor in 
Cornell University. About loo pp. i6mo. \Iit preparation^ 

There are many reasons, some of them obvious, for 
giving this essay a place in the English Readings series. 
One that may be mentioned is the remarkably clear 
insight it affords into the entire eighteenth-century way 
of criticising. The introduction and notes will direct 
the student's attention along this line of observation, 

Lyly : Endimion. 

With introduction and notes by George P. Baker, Instructor in 
Harvard College. About loo pp. i6mo. \Ready soon.] 

Lyly's plays really show him to a better advantage than 
does the EuphueSy by which he is chiefly remembered, 
and his place in English dramatic history makes it de- 
sirable that one at least should be easily accessible. 



English "Tradings for Students. 



Macaulay and Carlyle : Croker's Bosweirs John- 
son. 

The complete essays, with brief notes and an introduction by James 
Morgan Hart, Professor in Cornell University. A preliminary 
edition, without notes, is now supplied. 93 pp. i2mo. Boards. 
Teachers' price, 30 cents ; postage 4 cents additional. 

These parallel treatments of Croker's editing, and of 
the characters of Boswell and Dr. Johnson, afford an 
unusual opportunity for comparative study. The two 
essays present a constant contrast in intellectual and 
moral methods of criticism which cannot fail to turn the 
attention of students to important principles of biographi- 
cal writing, while equally important principles of diction 
are impressively illustrated in the two strongly marked 
styles. The essays also offer an excellent introduction 
to the study of the literary history of Johnson's times. 

Marlowe : Edward 11. With the best passages from 
Tamburlaine the Great, and from his Poems. 

With brief notes and an introductory essay by Edward T. Mc- 
Laughlin, Professor in Yale College. [In press.] 

Aside from the intrinsic value of Edward II., as Mar- 
lowe's most important work, the play is of great interest 
in connection with Shakespere. The earlier chronicle 
drama was in Shakespere's memory as he was writing 
Richard 11, as various passages prove, and a comparison 
of the two plays (sketched in the introduction) affords 
basis for a study in the development of the Elizabethan 
drama. Since Tamburlaine has really no plot and 
character-development, extracts that illustrate its poeti- 
cal quality lose nothing for lack of a context. The 
unobjectionable beginning of Hero and Leander is per- 
haps the finest narrative verse of the sixteenth century. 



English "fadings for Students. 



Specimens of Argumentation. I. Classic. 

Chosen and edited by George P. Baker, Instructor in English 
in Harvard College, and Non-resident Lecturer on Argumentative 
Composition in Wellesley College. \^In preparation.'] 

Specimens of Argumentation. II. Modern. 

Chosen and edited by George P. Baker. i6mo. i86 pp. 
Boards. [In press.] 

This compilation includes Lord Chatham's speech on 
the withdrawal of troops from Boston, Lord Mansfield's 
argument in the Evans case, the first letj:er of Junius, 
the first of Huxley's American addresses on evolution, 
Erskine's defence of Lord George Gordon, and an ad- 
dress of Beecher's in Liverpool during the cotton riots. 
The choice and editing has been controlled by the needs 
of the courses in " Forensics" in Harvard College. The 
earlier selections offer excellent material for practice in 
drawing briefs, a type of such a brief being given in the 
volume. The notes aim to point out the conditions 
under which each argument was made, the difficulties to 
be overcome, and wherein the power of the argument 
lies. It is thought that the collection, as a whole, will 
be found to contain available illustrations of all the main 
principles of argumentation, including the handling of 
evidence, persuasion, and scientific exposition. 

HENRY HOLT & CO., Publishers, New York. 



OCT 4 - 1950 



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